Hi, I'm Isha! I'm a PhD student at MIT CSAIL working on language models, AI agents, and machine learning. I'm lucky to be coadvised by Professor Yoon Kim and Professor Marzyeh Ghassemi. My PhD is funded by MIT's Great Educators Fellowship and the National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship. I also currently serve as Co-President of MIT's Graduate Women in Course 6.

I graduated from Harvard University in 2023 with a B.A. in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science. I worked in Professor Hima Lakkaraju's lab, AI4LIFE, and at IBM Research AI, and was lucky to have been a part of the Harvard Business School Technology Innovation Fellowship.

My work has been published at venues such as NeurIPS, EMNLP, ICML, and TMLR, and has been awarded the ACM Cutler Bell Prize for Excellence in Computing, NCWIT Collegiate Award, and Davidson Fellowship, among others.

My current interests lie in studying how language models can be efficiently integrated into real world workflows via AI Agents, as well as how we can scale LMs to enable these applications.

You can reach me at ishapuri@mit.edu or ishapuri@alumni.harvard.edu. I'd love to hear from you!

Curriculum Vitae: CV

News

  • [Feb 2025] Excited to be serving as an Associate Program Chair at NeurIPS 2025!

  • [Feb 2025] Our paper on probabilistic inference for LM scaling is now on arXiv! Check out the project website for more details on how we scale small LMs to o1 level! Will be giving a talk about our work at RedHat on 2/7!

  • [Dec 2024] Our work on studying bias in LLMs for mental health support was covered by MIT News and published in EMNLP Findings.


Publications

Papers

Other Projects

  • DYSCERN - A Scalable, Freely Accessible Machine Learning Application for the Early Detection of Dyslexia
    Isha Puri and David Cox
    [Project Video + Demo]

Awards / Honors

  • MIT Great Educators Fellowship
    (MIT EECS)
  • National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship
  • Harvard Technology Innovation Fellow
    (Harvard Business School)
  • Kempner Institute Graduate Fellowship (6 years, fully funded PhD) (Declined)
    (Harvard University)
  • Gordon Wu Fellowship (5 year fellowship) (Declined)
    (Princeton University)
  • Derek Bok Award for Distinction in Teaching
    (Harvard University)
  • ACM Cutler Bell Prize for Excellence in Computing Research
    (Association of Computing Machinery) (4 selected nationwide)
  • Davidson Fellowship
    (Recognized by Forbes as “World’s Most Prestigious Undergraduate Scholarship”)
  • Donald and Kathleen Pfister Prize for Excellence in the Sciences
    (Harvard University)
  • ThermoFisher Scientific Collegiate Fellowship
    (6 chosen nationwide)
  • NCWIT Collegiate Prize
    (National Center for Women in Information Technology, 6 selected nationwide)
  • Coca Cola Scholarship
    (250 chosen from > 90,000 applications)
  • Forbes, 20 of America’s Brightest Students (2019)
  • Google Science Fair Global Finalist (20 worldwide)
  • Intel ISEF Grand Award Winner (2nd Place)
    (International Science and Engineering Fair 2018)
  • National Security Agency Mathematics Honor Award

Personal Things!

Outside of research, I:
  • play the harp! I've recently been getting into playing harp adaptions of Bollywood and Disney songs : )
  • love learning about history and political science- when I was little, my parents thought I would grow up to be a historian. I can spend hours going down Wikipeida wormholes of famous historical figures or time periods - some of my favorites right now are the Gilded Age and the WWII Science Industrial Age
  • love late night comedy - I've seen several live tapings of every late night show except Trevor Noah, who I've seen on tour twice. My multiverse dream would be to intern for The Late Show, Last Week Tonight, or The Daily Show for a summer.
  • collect postcards! I've been assembling my postcard wall since I was 15. It now has nearly 650 postcards - each inscribed with the date, a short story from the day, and signatures of who was there:)