Justin Payan

I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Carnegie Mellon University. I work in the lab of Prof. Nihar Shah.

About my research

AI advances bring massive increases in scientific output. But how do we ensure that the drastic increase in scientific output couples with an increase in true understanding and progress? To address these questions, I apply tools from a wide variety of areas – including machine learning, combinatorial optimization, and the social sciences – to ensure AI applications in science lead to real productivity.

More about me

I got my PhD at UMass Amherst, where my advisor was Yair Zick. Before starting my PhD, I received my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at the University of Georgia and worked for a year at Vertica as a software engineer. During my PhD, I also enjoyed interning at Amazon Alexa (2020, 2021), Microsoft (2022), and Adobe Research (2023).

My resume is available here, and my PhD thesis is available here.