About Me
I am a Master's student in Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, specializing in Human Language Technology. My research focuses on developing and evaluating Large Language Models for scientific research, particularly in astrophysics.
I'm passionate about bridging the gap between AI capabilities and domain expert needs, working at the intersection of natural language processing, machine learning interpretability, and scientific applications. I'm also interested in AI safety and the social ethics of technology.
Research Interests
Large Language Models • AI Safety and Misalignment • Scientific AI Applications • ML Interpretability • Human-AI Collaboration • NLP Evaluation • Prompt Engineering
Experience
Research Assistant
AI for Forensics (AI4F) – JHU / NIST
Conducting research at the intersection of AI and forensic science in collaboration with NIST. Work includes surveying AI tools across forensics-adjacent domains, building structured analyses of AI adoption patterns, and contributing to stakeholder documentation on responsible AI integration in forensic laboratories.
Research Intern
Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian - AstroAI
Conducted research on Multi-Modal LLMs for Astrophysics, focusing on prompt engineering to generate meaningful summaries about astrophysical sources, extracting embedded physical parameters, and applying sparse autoencoders to uncover patterns and relationships between astronomical objects.
Research Participant
Jelinek Summer Workshop & Space Astronomy Summer Program
Developed and evaluated LLM-powered chatbots for astronomy research, deployed in Slack. Created evaluation datasets with expert astronomers and implemented LLM-based relevance scoring systems to assess chatbot response quality.
Data Science Intern
Los Alamos National Laboratory - Omega Technical Services
Collaborated with the industrial engineering team on task scheduling optimization through databases and automation. Utilized MicroStrategy, Excel, SQL, and Python for data analysis and visualization.
Publications
Encoding and Understanding Astrophysical Information in Large Language Model-Generated Summaries
NeurIPS: ML4PS Workshop, 2025 (accepted)
From Queries to Criteria: Understanding How Astronomers Evaluate LLMs
Conference on Language Modeling (COLM), 2025 (accepted)
Selected Projects
Testing Social Reasoning in LLMs
Spring 2026Designed and evaluated a multi-dimensional benchmark of 40 original scenarios spanning Theory of Mind, Pragmatics, and Chain-of-Thought reasoning across 12 state-of-the-art LLMs. Recruited a human baseline (n=12) to quantify the gap between model and human-level social reasoning.
Regional Variation in ChatGPT Use Across U.S. States
Spring 2026Applied BERTopic to 68,668 first-turn prompts from the WildChat corpus to study geographic and socioeconomic variation in ChatGPT use across 36 U.S. states. Found that education and income correlate with specialized creative uses, while generic image-generation requests are more common in lower-education and lower-income states.
A2CPS Discovery Agent
Spring 2026Built an AI-powered natural language interface for querying the A2CPS biomedical dataset, translating plain English questions into read-only SQL and surfacing relevant documentation using retrieval-augmented generation. Developed with React, Hono, and the Anthropic Claude API.
Hotspot Homing Robot
Sept 2024 – May 2025Autonomous mobile robot for detecting and localizing rogue access points in office environments. Integrated wireless signal processing with SLAM navigation systems. Sponsored by RTX.
Solar Panel Mars Rover
Fall 2023Autonomous Mars Rover prototype with solar recharging capabilities. Developed motion control system using Arduino and implemented sun-tracking algorithm for optimal energy collection.
Quantum Computer Simulator
Spring 2022Python-based Quantum Computer simulator leveraging object-oriented programming principles in a collaborative semester-long project.
Get in Touch
Feel free to reach out! I'm always interested in discussing research collaborations or interesting problems at the intersection of AI and science.
kmccor23 [at] jh [dot] edu
kieramccormick6 [at] gmail [dot] com