I am an undergraduate student at Harvard University in the class of 2026, studying Computer Science and Mind, Brain, and Behavior, and advised by Prof. Stuart Shieber.
I'm broadly passionate about the interface between language and thought, with a focus on inductive biases in learning in both humans and machines.
My overarching research goal is to develop machines that acquire language and perform reasoning with the compositional flexibility and sample efficiency characteristic of humans. At the moment, my research is characterized by the use of techniques from natural language processing and program synthesis.
Over the summer, I am working as a visiting student at MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences in the Computational Cognitive Science Group, where I am fortunate to be supervised by Gabriel Grand and Prof. Joshua Tenenbaum.
Previously, I have worked in the George Church Lab at the Wyss Institute at Harvard, the Sabatini Lab at Harvard Medical School, and the WOLF Lab at the Harvard Department of Linguistics.
Publications
Loose LIPS Sink Ships: Asking Questions in Battleship with Language-Informed Program Sampling. Gabriel Grand, Valerio Pepe, Jacob Andreas, Joshua B. Tenenbaum. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 46. (2024) [EScholarship]
SeqVerify: An accessible analysis tool for cell line genomic integrity, contamination, and gene editing outcomes. Merrick Pierson Smela*, Valerio Pepe*, Steven Lubbe, Evangelos Kiskinis, George M. Church. Stem Cell Reports. (2024) [bioRxiv]
Note: '*' indicates equal contributions by multiple authors.