Structured research opportunities with expert mentorship
The CASI Research Scholars program connects talented undergraduate and masters students with professors, postdoctoral scholars, and senior PhD students to work on cutting-edge AI safety research. This program differs from our Research Fellowship in that research projects are pre-scoped by PhD mentors, allowing you to join a well-defined research initiative with clear direction and support.
While our Research Fellowship is exploratory—where you help define your own research direction through team matching and scoping—the Research Scholars program provides pre-scoped projects mentored by PhD students. This allows for deeper focus and more immediate research engagement.
Each research project has its own application process. Applications typically require around 10 hours to complete, which may include project-specific assignments, essays, or research proposals. This ensures we find mentees who are genuinely excited about the project at hand.
Mentors: Alex Robey, Matan Shtepel, and Davis Brown.
We investigate decomposition attacks, by which an adversary can elicit harmful knowledge (e.g., help with cyber or biological terrorism) by breaking up harmful queries into a series of benign queries across models and context windows. This attack vector is extremely real-world: evidence suggests the Las Vegas Cybertruck explosion is due to a decomposition attack, and major labs including OpenAI are actively interested in scaling defenses.
Expected commitment: 10-20 hours per week (varies by project). This includes both collaborative work and independent research time.
We are actively recruiting new CASI Research Scholar mentors. As soon as our next round of mentors is recruited, we will open applications for mentees. In the meantime, we encourage you to:
Interested in mentoring? Email us at casi@andrew.cmu.edu!