I’m an incoming Master's student in Computer Science at Brigham Young University, having recently completed a BS in BYU's Applied and Computational Mathematics program. I work with David Wingate in his Perception, Control, and Cognition Lab.

I built a chatroom that used large language models to improve polarizing political conversations. My group published a paper about it in PNAS.

I’m interested in understanding how large language models can help us understand and improve our political climate, as well as faithfully simulate human personas. To this end, I'm especially interested in using small language models, trained on carefully engineered synthetic data, as proxies to study the biases of frontier models, trained on trillions of tokens of natural language data.

I’m on Twitter, Bluesky, and LinkedIn, and you can email me at vin at this domain.