Biographies for talk introductions, panels, and press. Please use the short bio unless a longer one is requested.

Short Bio

Ryan Louie is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in Vanderbilt University’s College of Connected Computing, with a secondary affiliation in the Peabody College of Education and Human Development. His research spans AI and education, human-computer interaction, and natural language processing, and studies how AI can be positvely used to strengthen human skills in high-stakes, relational domains such as providing mental health care. Before joining Vanderbilt, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University in the NLP and HCI groups, and he received his PhD from Northwestern University’s Technology and Social Behavior program and BS from FW Olin College of Engineering.

Long Bio

Ryan Louie is an Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University with a primary appointment in Computer Science in the College of Connected Computing and a secondary affiliation with the Peabody College of Education and Human Development. His work contributes to AI and education, human-computer interaction, and natural language processing. He develops purpose-built AI tools for upskilling people in high-stakes, relational domains; improves the safety of AI systems through a psychosocial perspective; and creates approaches that accelerate the responsible deployment and evaluation of AI systems for upskilling and learning.

His research advances how people collaborate with, adapt, and evaluate AI systems for upskilling in societally-important domains such as mental health care and creativity. He builds human-AI collaboration interfaces that let people express their personal intentions and domain knowledge and iteratively shape model behavior through intelligible feedback, including Roleplay-doh, which enables senior counselors to co-design AI simulated patients for novice practice. He creates domain-adaptation techniques that learn efficiently from scarce expert supervision while keeping outputs faithful to quality standards. And he advances evaluation in human-centered AI through frameworks such as SPHERE and the Expressive Communication framework, along with experiments including a randomized controlled study with 90+ novice counselors showing that practice with LLM-simulated patients paired with structured feedback produced meaningful gains in counseling skills, while practice alone degraded empathy. Taken together, this work enables a rigorous science of AI upskilling: understanding how factors in the human, the AI model, and the interface between them shape human-centered outcomes.

Before joining Vanderbilt, Ryan was a postdoctoral researcher in the Stanford Computer Science department’s NLP and HCI groups from 2023 to 2026. He received his PhD in 2023 from Northwestern University’s Technology and Social Behavior program, where he worked on human-AI interaction and social computing, and his B.S. in Robotics from the F.W. Olin College of Engineering in 2017. His work has been recognized with honorable mention awards at CHI. [PLACEHOLDER: other awards, fellowships, and funding to add.]

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