Rate My Professor Ellie Pavlick

Ellie Pavlick is the Briger Family Distinguished Associate Professor of Computer Science and Associate Professor of Cognitive and Psychological Sciences at Brown University. She received her PhD in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2017. In 2012, she earned a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Johns Hopkins University and a Bachelor of Music in Saxophone Performance from the Peabody Conservatory. Pavlick joined Brown University as an assistant professor and advanced to her current distinguished associate professor role. She also serves as a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind and leads the Language Understanding and Representation (LUNAR) Lab. Her academic appointments include Director of the NSF AI Research Institute on Interaction for AI Assistants and Associate Chair of Computer Science at Brown.

Pavlick’s research centers on natural language processing, with a focus on computational models of semantics and pragmatics that emulate human inferences. Her work examines how humans and computational models, including large language models, achieve language understanding, conceptual representations, reasoning, learning, and generalization, often through interdisciplinary collaborations in cognitive science, neuroscience, and philosophy. She teaches courses such as Computational Linguistics, Interpretability of Language Models, and Computational Semantics. Pavlick received Brown University’s Early Career Research Achievement Award in the Physical Sciences category in 2024 and the DARPA Young Faculty Award. She maintains an active profile in the field through her leadership roles and research contributions.