Kyungeun is an AI safety researcher with a PhD in Physics from Columbia and postdoctoral research at Yale. She played key leadership roles in international collaborations in dark matter and neutrino physics, leading contributions to over 40 peer-reviewed publications with more than 8,800 citations, and has served as a reviewer for physics journals. Her work spanned experimental design, detector construction, data analysis, and publication, with hands-on experience at laboratories including the Kamioka Observatory in Japan and Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. Through her work on the CUORE and XENON experiments, she developed expertise in cross-cultural scientific collaboration and systematic experimental methodology, and took on leadership roles including data production lead and vetting board member for CUORE.

She currently works as an independent AI safety researcher, supported by BlueDot Impact grants, studying what safety interventions actually change inside language models, from red-teaming their behavior to analyzing their internals. This grew out of her fellowship at ERA:AI Cambridge, where she analyzed how machine unlearning modifies model weights and released a model variant from that work on HuggingFace. Before AI safety, she worked in industry ML, developing production systems at NBCUniversal for major events like the Olympics and Super Bowl, and at CloudTrucks where she built end-to-end ML product pipelines including personalized recommendation engines. See the Projects tab for more details.

Beyond her technical work, she is an avid learner who engages with podcasts, audiobooks and videos covering philosophy, big history, art, fashion, classical music, and literature. She maintains an active lifestyle through regular dance classes (for over a decade), barre, pilates, and yoga, complemented by frequent walks and monthly museum visits. She enjoys traveling, with extensive experiences across Europe, the Americas, and Africa. She likes tango and bossa nova, as well as K-pop music, and recently enjoys reading sci-fi. She preserves her attention by avoiding social media, choosing instead to nurture meaningful friendships through weekly or monthly conversations.

Featured Data Scientist Profile: Encouraging Women in STEM

The Ella Project, May 2018

Profiled as a Senior Lead Data Scientist discussing barriers and opportunities for women in STEM careers, sharing insights on overcoming stereotypes and building confidence in technical fields.

Career Advice Panel: Data Scientists and Engineers Share Their Journey

Insight Data Science, March 2018

Participated in panel discussion at Columbia University offering career transition advice to students, sharing experiences from academia to industry data science.

NYT Coverage: Columbia Physicists' Underground Hunt for Universe's Missing Matter

New York Times, April 2011

Featured in coverage of dark matter research during graduate studies at Columbia University.

Invited Seminars & Talks (22 total)

Selected presentations at major research institutions

• "Unveiling the Nature of Neutrinos and Dark Matter", University of Washington, Apr 2017
• "Results of CUORE-0 and Prospects of the CUORE Experiment”, 38th International Conference on High Energy Physics, Aug 2016
• “Rare Event Searches with the CUORE and DM-Ice Experiments”, ICRR of the University of Tokyo, Japan, Jan 2016
• "Neutrinoless Double-beta Decay Search with the CUORE Experiment", MIT, Apr 2015
• "Initial Performance of the CUORE-0 Experiment”, Brookhaven National Lab, Mar 2014
• “CUORE Neutrinoless Double-beta Decay Experiment”, University of Bern, Switzerland, Nov 2013
• "Dark Matter Results from XENON100", SLAC, Oct 2012

Complete list of all presentations (PDF)