09/10/2026
When Serena Wang walked into her first computer science systems class as an undergraduate at Harvard University, she never imagined that a decade later, her professor — Dr. Margo Seltzer — would become her colleague in the same department at UBC.
As an undergraduate student, Dr. Wang explored research projects in astronomy and biology, but none of them felt like a good fit — until she found computer science.
“With computer science, there was both the math side and the social side,” she says. “I felt that the field could do a lot of good for people if applied thoughtfully.”
Now, as an Assistant Professor at UBC Computer Science, Dr. Wang focuses on evaluation in AI systems, asking the research question: How should computer scientists evaluate AI systems in terms of fairness, safety, and capabilities in such a way that improves social welfare?
By combining methods in theoretical computer science, statistics and economic theory, she aims to influence how researchers think about how evaluations are designed.
“Whoever designs the evaluations affects the behaviour of the developers of the models, which in turn affects the behaviour of the models that get released,” she says. “These models might end up with undesirable behaviours, so we need to make sure that we get it right at the level of evaluation.”
Read more: https://www.cs.ubc.ca/news/2026/09/serena-wang
