stephtw@seas.upenn.edu

I am a PhD student candidate at the University of Pennsylvania in the Computer and Information Science department where I am advised by Professor Danaé Metaxa as a member of Penn HCI.

My research focuses on sociotechnical audits of AI and algorithmic systems in online information environments, with applications in civic information, news, and targeted advertising. I draw on HCI, NLP, and CSS to evaluate these systems and design for greater transparency and user agency.

As a '26 Summer Fellow at Stanford RegLab, I collaborated with a government agency to responsibly bring legal AI tooling into its workflows. More recently, I have been conducting a multilingual audit of AI chatbots providing local voting information in advance of the 2026 U.S. midterms.

I completed my MS in Computer Science and my BS in Symbolic Systems both from Stanford University. My work has been generously supported by an AWS gift for research in Trustworthy AI.