Hiba Ahsan

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I am a PhD student at Northeastern University in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences, advised by Byron Wallace. I work in the clinical natural language processing domain. My research interests include (1) developing ML/NLP methods for clinical tasks using unstructured electronic health record data, and (2) evaluating and improving LLMs for healthcare applications.

I graduated with a Masters in Computer Science from UMass Amherst in 2023. Prior to Masters, I was a Research Engineer in the Advertising team at Microsoft IDC where I worked on improving the relevance of sponsored search results. I hold a Bachelors in Information Technology from the National Institute of Technology Karnataka, India.

I'm graduating in Fall 2026 and actively looking for industry and postdoc positions. Please reach out if you think I'd be a good fit!

news

Jan 26, 2026 Our paper on whether SAEs can help reveal and mitigate racial bias in LLMs for healthcare has been accepted at ICLR 2026!
Oct 24, 2025 Our work on elucidating mechanisms of demographic bias was featured by Ai2.
Aug 20, 2025 Our paper Elucidating Mechanisms of Demographic Bias in LLMs for Healthcare has been accepted at EMNLP (Findings) 2025!
May 05, 2024 I will be interning at Codametrix this summer.
Apr 04, 2024 Our paper Retrieving Evidence from EHRs with LLMs: Possibilities and Challenges has been accepted at CHIL 2024!

selected publications

  1. Elucidating Mechanisms of Demographic Bias in LLMs for Healthcare
    Hiba Ahsan , Arnab Sen Sharma , Silvio Amir , and 2 more authors
    In Emperical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) Findings , 2025
  2. Retrieving Evidence from EHRs with LLMs: Possibilities and Challenges
    Hiba Ahsan , Denis Jered McInerney , Jisoo Kim , and 4 more authors
    In Conference on Health, Inference, and Learning , 2024