How to Contact Me

If you have a question about my research or papers or if your request does not fall into the below categories, please email me! I sometimes take up to 1-2 weeks to respond and do appreciate a reminder email if I have not responded within a week. I tend to answer emails on Friday afternoons. If your request is more urgent, please include “[Urgent]” in the subject line.

My email: sarahwie[at]umd.edu

Information for Interested Students

If you are interested in doing research with me, please fill out this form. I look at the responses every couple of weeks when my group is not at capacity (see below) and contact relevant applicants for 30-minute interviews.

• I do not have the capacity to work with Masters students in the professional programs at UMD (applied ML, AI, or Data Science), nor with students not at UMD at this time. I am primarily recruiting 1) PhD student collaborators in any discipline (if have the relevant ML background/experience), and 2) Bachelors/Masters students in Computer Science.
• My lab is currently (Oct. 2025) at capacity for Bachelors and Masters researchers. I may recruit 1-2 more in spring 2026. If you have filled the form since early September 2025 and not heard back from me, this is probably why. You do not need to fill the form again unless you want to update your information.
• A great way to work with me is through the course projects in my special topics course. If you are in my course, I am happy to discuss your project during office hours or via email!

If you are a current student in a full-time PhD, Masters, or undergraduate program at UMD, filling out the above form is sufficient for expressing research interest. If you wish to email me for some other reason, please add the heading “[Current Student]” to your email.

If you are a prospective student, I plan to admit 1-2 PhD students in the coming (fall 2026 start) cycle. Please apply to the Computer Science PhD program here by the December 5, 2025 deadline and mention my name in your application.

• You may email me once with the header “[Prospective Student]”, but unfortunately I almost never have time to read these emails.
• You may be able to get an application fee waiver by applying here (no deadline, but best to apply with ample time ahead of the deadline) or here (for domestic students; Nov. 15 deadline).
• Here are the topics I will be recruiting for/currently interested in, from (roughly) most to least: steering & inference-time model control, developing core (mechanistic) interpretability methods for understanding LLM internal representations and computations, chain-of-thought faithfulness and interpreting reasoning models, interpreting newer LLM architectures like MoEs and text diffusion models, memorization and n-gram LMs, interpreting multimodal models.

Q & A

Do you have opportunities for undergraduates or masters students in your lab?

Yes (though currently unpaid; volunteer or for course credit only); please fill out the form.

Are you looking for external student visitors or interns?

I consider these on a case-by-case basis. I currently do not have funding for hosting students or interns. If you do not require funding, you may fill out the form.