About Me
Hi, I'm Lucia. I'm a JD/CS PhD student at Stanford, advised by Daniel E. Ho, Christopher Manning, and Peter Henderson, at the RegLab, Stanford NLP Group, Polaris Lab, and CITP. I'm supported by the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship.
My research focuses on the intersection of maching learning, NLP, and law. I'm interested in improving language modeling for reasoning in environments where information is incomplete and shaped by competing interpretations, norms, and institutions, with an eye towards supporting public interest applications.
My past work has centered on legal reasoning, where I studied how legal contexts expose core challenges in language model capabilities, including analogical reasoning, interpretive ambiguity, epistemic calibration, and collaborative deliberation and decision-making.
More recently, I've been working on methods for principled information-seeking in language model agents and open-ended discovery problems. And more broadly, thinking about belief representations, connections between reinforcement learning theory and language modeling, and how to develop better computational models of evidence-driven learning that support hypothesis formation, critique, and revision, inspired by ideas from philosophy and cognitive science.
I'm also interested in technical and regulatory questions around AI governance, including how legal frameworks can adapt to emerging commercial AI harms like traceability challenges, generative search engine optimization, platform self-preferencing, and algorithmic price collusion.
In law school, I lead the Stanford Animal Protection Pro Bono Project (SAPP), serve as president of the Stanford Law and Technology Association (SLATA), as VP of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence and Law Society (SAILS), as an Academic Co-Chair of the American Constitution Society (ACS), and am a member editor on the Stanford Law Review.
Other Past Lives
I've built computational tools for administrative adjudication, legal and policy analysis, and regulatory enforcement, through collaborations with the U.S. Department of Labor, the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender, and the ACLU. In law school, I've also worked on environmental law projects, including research on air pollution monitoring and air permitting undercompliance in the San Joaquin Valley for the Leadership Counsel for Justice and AccountabilitySee our legal brief, technical plan, and interactive map., and language model-based methods for identifying fact patterns in environmental litigation for Animal Partisan.
Prior to graduate school, I worked on machine learning for the LinkedIn newsfeed, on backend infrastructure at Khan Academy during the COVID-19 transition to remote learning, on content integrity tools at Meta, and as the first software engineer intern at Change Research, a public benefit corporation startup, on making representative online polling more accessible to grassroots and downballot political campaigns using statistical techniques, where I contributed to a patent application on my workWe were the first polling firm to correctly call Andrew Gillum's win in the Florida Democratic primary..
I graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science and a minor in Math, and an M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford, advised by Mary Wootters.
I spent about six years as a volunteer teacher and mentor at StreetCode Academy, where I taught and designed computer science curriculum for the flagship introductory computer science class. StreetCode Academy is a non-profit organization that provides free computer science education to historically underrepresented communities in East Palo Alto.
As a high school student, I was the Pacific Northwest Director of Activism for Junior State of America, where I registered thousands of high school students to vote through National Voter Registration Day. I was also a field organizer for the Bus Project (now Next Up Action Fund), a non-profit organization focused on getting young people engaged in politics and voter disenfranchisement issues. I testified before the Secretary of State of Oregon Jeanne Atkins on behalf of the Bus ProjectSee testimony. in support of the Oregon Motor Voter Act, passed in 2016.