Serena L. Wang

I am an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair affiliated with Amii.

I have also concurrently worked with Google Research at 20% time since 2016, where I have had the privilege of working with Ravi Kumar, Preston McAfee, and Maya Gupta.

I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard hosted by Ariel Procaccia from 2024-2026. I completed my PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, advised by Michael I. Jordan.

My research is motivated by the goal of understanding and improving the long term societal impacts of AI. AI is not developed in a vacuum, but is part of a multi-stakeholder ecosystem with asymmetries in information, power, and values, and I think about incentives and decision making in this ecosystem. My recent work focuses on the role of evaluation in the AI ecosystem, including how to mitigate gaming [WBAJ’25], how to discover new metrics [WJLM’25] [WBKLMV’25], and how to think about representation and fairness [PSWZ’25]. My research combines ideas from AI/ML, economics, statistics, and optimization.

I am recruiting PhD and PhD-track Masters students applying in Fall 2026 to start in 2027. If you’re interested in working with me, please apply through UBC Computer Science and list my name in your application.

Email: serenalw (at) cs.ubc.ca