I'm Elizabeth, an Anthropic Fellow and physics PhD student/graduate research fellow at UC Berkeley studying capability expression in AI systems. My research currently focuses on understanding how language models acquire new capabilities and adapt to new tasks, with a particular emphasis on the information theoretic requirements for elicitation of latent capabilities vs. teaching new skills as well as the impact of different training paradigms (e.g. pretraining, RLHF) on capability acquisition. I'm interested in how these insights can be applied to improve the performance and safety of AI systems, particularly in the context of large language models.

Prior to this, I developed and applied novel optical techniques to study emergent phenomena and exotic phases of matter in quantum materials. My research focused on how light and material systems interact under the interplay of quantum, electronic, and magnetic degrees of freedom. I used various optical techniques at the visible and near-infrared regions to resolve and reconstruct the broken symmetries that characterize these states in strongly correlated electron systems.

In my free time, I enjoy running, film photography, music production, analog video synthesis, and collecting other creative hobbies.