Will Schwarzer

Hey there, I’m Will. I’m a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I work with Philip Thomas, Bruno Castro da Silva and Scott Niekum. I work on AI alignment, evaluation, and oversight, and broadly associate with both the RL and safety communities. My long-term goal is to safely realize the benefits of abundant intelligence.

Fun fact: this headshot was taken at an excellent studio in Beijing while I was studying Mandarin there. I’m always happy to chat in Chinese. Aside from languages, I also enjoy playing the piano and rock climbing. I particularly love exploring climbing gyms in new countries (tally so far: three in Beijing, one in Bangkok, one in Istanbul, one in Fort William, Scotland, one in London, two in Seoul, and two in Montreal).

Note to students: if you’d like advice or to work with me, please read this before reaching out.

Note on LLM use: In general and where not prohibited, text under my name may have been drafted and edited using the assistance of LLMs. I take responsibility for and believe the correctness of all text under my name (the ICMJE authorship guidelines are a good example of what I take this to entail).