I’m an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department, Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, affiliated with the Johns Hopkins Data Science and AI Institute.
I work at the intersection of AI and the social sciences. My research focuses on 1) making AI more socially aware, and 2) developing AI methods for the social sciences, with the goal of understanding, simulating, and changing human behavior in critical domains such as diet and health.
I collaborate with tech companies, practitioners, and interdisciplinary researchers to translate my research into real-world impact. This typically requires advancing NLP methods, models, and datasets for high-impact social applications.
Before JHU, I was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, advised by Dan Jurafsky at the Stanford NLP group, and I got my PhD at EFPL, advised by Robert West.
Fields: Computational Social Science (CSS), Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Improving LLMs: Teaching LLMs to distinguish between using and mentioning words (NAACL ‘24)
Understanding behavior: LLM annotations for valid estimates in social science (NAACL ‘25 & ic2s2)
Simulating behavior: Identifying grounding gaps when LLMs simulate support providers (NAACL ‘24)
Changing behavior: LLM interventions to improve diets by helping food scientists and chefs (ICML ‘25)
Rising Star in EECS (MIT), 2024
Rising Star in GenAI (UMass), 2024
Rising Star in Data Science (University of Chicago), 2023
EPFL Thesis Distinction (awarded to top 8% EPFL theses), 2023
Swiss National Science Foundation Fellowship, 2022
Best Paper Honorable Mention Award, CSCW 2021
Best Reviewer Award, ICWSM 2021 & 2023
Best Teaching Assistant Award, EPFL IC School 2018
Dibakar Chaudhary, JHU MS
Laila Paredes, JHU MS
Cicely Zhu, JHU Undergrad
I’m looking for PhD students, master, and undergraduate students to join my group. We currently have these specific opportunities.
1. AI for Sustainable Future Foods
Bianca Datta, Markus J. Buehler, Yvonne Chow, Kristina Gligorić, Dan Jurafsky, David L. Kaplan, Rodrigo Ledesma-Amaro, Giorgia Del Missier, Lisa Neidhardt, Karim Pichara, Benjamin Sanchez-Lengeling, Miek Schlangen, Skyler R. St. Pierre, Ilias Tagkopoulos, Anna Thomas, Nicholas J. Watson, and Ellen Kuhl.
Preprint, 2025.
2. Meat-Free Day Reduces Greenhouse Gas Emissions but Poses Challenges for
Customer Retention and Adherence to Dietary Guidelines
Giuseppe Russo, Kristina Gligorić, Vincent Moreau, and Robert West.
Preprint, 2025.
1. What Can Large Language Models Do for Sustainable Food?
Anna T. Thomas, Adam Yee, Andrew Mayne, Maya B. Mathur, Dan Jurafsky, and Kristina Gligorić.
ICML, 2025.
Also presented at Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning at ICLR 2025 and AI & Scientific Discovery Workshop at NAACL 2025.
Food System Innovation media coverage, The Bittman Project
2. Can Unconfident LLM Annotations Be Used for Confident Conclusions?
Kristina Gligorić*, Tijana Zrnic*, Cinoo Lee*, Emmanuel Candès, and Dan Jurafsky.
NAACL, 2025.
GitHub tutorial
Tutorial website: Bridging Human and LLM Annotations for Statistically Valid Computational Social Science
3. Food Choice Mimicry on a Large University Campus.
Kristina Gligorić, Arnaud Chiolero, Emre Kıcıman, Ryen W. White, Eric Horvitz, and Robert West.
PNAS Nexus, 2024.
4. People who share encounters with racism are silenced online by humans and machines, but a guideline-reframing intervention holds promise.
Cinoo Lee*, Kristina Gligorić*, Pratyusha Ria Kalluri*, Maggie Harrington*, Esin Durmus, Kiara L. Sanchez, Nay San, Danny Tse, Xuan Zhao, MarYam G. Hamedani, Hazel Markus, Dan Jurafsky, and Jennifer L. Eberhardt.
PNAS, 2024.
5. In-class Data Analysis Replications: Teaching Students while Testing Science,
Kristina Gligorić*, Tiziano Piccardi*, Jake Hofman, and Robert West.
Harvard Data Science Review, 2024.
6. Measuring and Shaping the Nutritional Environment via Food Sales Logs: Case Studies of Campus-Wide Food Choice and a Call to Action,
Kristina Gligorić, Robin Zbinden, Arnaud Chiolero, Emre Kiciman, Ryen W. White, Eric Horvitz, and Robert West.
Frontiers in Nutrition, 2024.
7. NLP Systems That Can’t Tell Use from Mention Censor Counterspeech, but Teaching the Distinction Helps,
Kristina Gligorić, Myra Cheng, Lucia Zheng, Esin Durmus, and Dan Jurafsky.
NAACL, 2024.
8. Grounding Gaps in Language Model Generations,
Omar Shaikh*, Kristina Gligorić*, Ashna Khetan, Matthias Gerstgrasser, Diyi Yang, and Dan Jurafsky.
NAACL, 2024.
9. Othering and low prestige framing of immigrant cuisines in US restaurant reviews and large language models,
Yiwei Luo, Kristina Gligorić, and Dan Jurafsky.
ICWSM, 2024.
10. AnthroScore: A Computational Linguistic Measure of Anthropomorphism,
Myra Cheng, Kristina Gligorić, Tiziano Piccardi, and Dan Jurafsky.
EACL, 2024.
Scientific American Media Coverage, New Scientist Media Coverage
Demo website
11. Revealed versus potential spatial accessibility of healthcare and changing patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic,
Kristina Gligorić*, Chaitanya Kamath*, Daniel Weiss*, Shailesh Bavadekar, Yun Liu, Tomer Shekel, Kevin Schulman*, and Evgeniy Gabrilovich*.
Nature Communications Medicine, 2023.
Blog post
12. Linguistic effects on news headline success: Evidence from thousands of online field experiments (registered report),
Kristina Gligorić, George Lifchits, Robert West, and Ashton Anderson.
PLOS ONE, 2023.
13. Computational Approaches for Studying Dietary Behaviors with Digital Traces,
Kristina Gligorić.
Ph.D. Thesis, EPFL, 2022.
14. Biased Bytes: On the Validity of Estimating Food Consumption from Digital Traces,
Kristina Gligorić, Irena Djordjević, and Robert West.
CSCW, 2022.
15. Anticipated versus Actual Effects of Platform Design Change: A Case Study of Twitter’s Character Limit,
Kristina Gligorić, Justyna Czestochowska, Ashton Anderson, and Robert West.
CSCW, 2022.
16. On the Context-Free Ambiguity of Emoji,
Justyna Czestochowska*, Kristina Gligorić*, Maxime Peyrard, Yann Mentha, Michal Bien, Andrea Grütter, Anita Auer, Aris Xanthos, and Robert West.
ICWSM, 2022.
(* equal contributions)
Talk at ICWSM
17. Population-scale dietary interests during the COVID-19 pandemic,
Kristina Gligorić, Arnaud Chiolero, Emre Kıcıman, Ryen W White, and Robert West.
Nature Communications, 2022.
Featured in Public Health Editors’ Highlights (the editorial)
EPFL coverage, Le temps media coverage, 20minutes, Swiss digital health coverage
Blog post
Talk at AMLD
18. Linguistic effects on news headline success: Evidence from thousands of online field experiments (registered report protocol),
Kristina Gligorić, George Lifchits, Robert West, and Ashton Anderson.
PLOS ONE, 2021.
19. Laughing Heads: Can Transformers Detect What Makes a Sentence Funny?
Maxime Peyrard, Beatriz Borges, Kristina Gligorić, and Robert West.
IJCAI, 2021.
20. 🏆 Best Paper Honorable Mention Award
Formation of Social Ties Influences Food Choice: A Campus-wide Longitudinal Study,
Kristina Gligorić, Ryen W White, Emre Kıcıman, Eric Horvitz, Arnaud Chiolero, and Robert West.
CSCW, 2021.
New Scientist Media Coverage
Talk at MSR JRC, Talk at ic2s2
21. Sudden Attention Shifts on Wikipedia During the COVID-19 Crisis,
Manoel Horta Ribeiro*, Kristina Gligorić*, Maxime Peyrard*, Florian Lemmerich, Markus Strohmaier, and Robert West.
ICWSM, 2021.
(* equal contributions)
Talk at ICWSM, Talk at Wikimedia Research Showcase
22. Global maps of travel time to healthcare facilities,
Daniel Weiss, Andrew Nelson, Camilo Vargas-Ruiz, Kristina Gligorić, Shailesh Bavadekar, Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Amelia Bertozzi-Villa, Jennifer Rozier, Harry Gibson, Tomer Shekel, Chaitanya Kamath, Allison Lieber, Kevin Schulman, Yang Shao, Vesa Qarkaxhija, Anita Nandi, Suzanne Keddie, Susan Rumisha, Punam Amratia, Rohan Arambepola, Elisabeth Chestnutt, Justin Millar, Tasmin Symons, Ewan Cameron, Katerine Battle, Samir Bhatt, and Peter Gething.
Nature Medicine, 2020.
World Economic Forum coverage
23. Causal Effects of Brevity on Style and Success in Social Media,
Kristina Gligorić, Ashton Anderson, and Robert West.
CSCW, 2019.
24. Comparing and Developing Tools to Measure the Readability of Domain-Specific Texts,
Elissa Redmiles, Lisa Maszkiewicz, Emily Hwang, Dhruv Kuchhal, Everest Liu, Miranda Morales, Denis Peskov, Sudha Rao, Rock Stevens, Kristina Gligorić, Sean Kross, Michelle Mazurek, and Hal Daume III.
EMNLP, 2019.
25. Message Distortion in Information Cascades,
Manoel Ribeiro, Kristina Gligorić, and Robert West.
TheWebConf, 2019.
26. How Constraints Affect Content: The Case of Twitter’s Switch from 140 to 280 Characters,
Kristina Gligorić, Ashton Anderson, and Robert West.
ICWSM, 2018.
telanova Media Coverage
27. Visible Light Communication Based Indoor Positioning via Compressed Sensing,
Kristina Gligorić, Manisha Ajmani, Dejan Vukobratović, and Sinan Sinanović.
IEEE Communication Letters, 2018.
TBD
Stanford SocialNLP reading group, learn more about it here!
Applied Data Analysis (CS-401) at EPFL, Fall 2018-2021 (head TA)
Data Visualization (COM-480) at EPFL, Spring 2019 and 2020
Analysis II (MATH-106) at EPFL, Spring 2018
I’m always looking for researchers to join my group. We currently have the following specific opportunities.
I’m looking for strong students with interests in NLP and Computational Social Science. I’m recruiting PhD students to start in Fall 2026 through the centralized admissions process. To be considered, please apply to the JHU Computer Science PhD program and list me as a potential advisor. The application deadline is December 15th 2025. Please feel free to reach out directly by email.
Please feel free to reach out directly by email.
I’m looking for strong students with interests in NLP and Computational Social Science. If you are an undergraduate or master JHU student interested in research opportunities, please feel free to reach out directly by email.
I currently have no openings for non-JHU undergraduate and master students. Please note that sometimes I simply don’t have the capicity to reply to each email personally. I really wish I did, but JHU graduate studies website is a good resource with all the key information.