PeopleofSuperintelligence

Lab leader

Allyson Ettinger

Allyson Ettinger is a language researcher whose work connects human language processing with AI systems. She earned degrees in linguistics and psychology at Brandeis, completed a linguistics PhD at Maryland, and held research and faculty roles at TTIC and the University of Chicago. Her work tested BERT's handling of context and negation, coauthored the WildGuard safety moderator, and included midtraining for Olmo 3. As of October 2026, she is a Senior Research Scientist at Ai2 and leads the team training Olmo and Molmo models.

Works
67
Citations
1,395
h-index
17

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 18 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2010

    Brandeis language studies

    She graduates from Brandeis in 2010 with bachelor's degrees in linguistics and psychology.

  2. 2018

    A Maryland doctorate

    She receives a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Maryland in 2018.

  3. 2018–2019

    Research faculty at TTIC

    During the 2018–19 academic year, she serves as a research assistant professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago.

  4. 2019

    Professor at the University of Chicago

    In Fall 2019, she joins the University of Chicago as an Assistant Professor in Linguistics, studying language processing in humans and AI systems.

  5. 2020

    What BERT is not

    In 2020, she publishes psycholinguistic diagnostics for language models and finds that BERT struggles with challenging inference and shows clear insensitivity to the contextual effects of negation.

  6. 2024

    WildGuard moderation tools

    She coauthors WildGuard in 2024, an open moderation tool that identifies malicious intent in user prompts, detects safety risks in model responses, and measures model refusals.

  7. 2025

    Olmo 3 midtraining

    For the 2025 Olmo 3 release, she leads midtraining on a fully open family of 7B and 32B language models.

  8. As of October 2026

    Leading AI for Science at Ai2

    As of October 2026, she is a Senior Research Scientist at Ai2 and leads the AI for Science team that trains Olmo and Molmo models. In September 2026, she presents a case study on public AI products at the Public AI Network seminar.

A language model matched the links in this timeline to people, organizations and papers (provisional, model-judged).

Career

  1. Since 2023Allen Institute for AI (Ai2)Senior Research Scientist
  2. 2019–2023University of ChicagoAssistant Professor
  3. 2018–2019Toyota Technological Institute at ChicagoResearch Assistant Professor

Education

  1. 2018University of MarylandPhD in Linguistics
  2. 2010Brandeis UniversityBachelor's degrees

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

Most-cited works

  1. What BERT Is Not: Lessons from a New Suite of Psycholinguistic Diagnostics for Language Models2020 · Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics · 513 citations
  2. Probing for semantic evidence of composition by means of simple classification tasks2016 · 131 citationsWith Philip Resnik
  3. Faith and Fate: Limits of Transformers on Compositionality2023 · neural information processing systems · 122 citations
  4. Towards Linguistically Generalizable NLP Systems: A Workshop and Shared Task2017 · 78 citationsWith Emily M. Bender and Hal Daumé III
  5. Assessing Phrasal Representation and Composition in Transformers2020 · Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) · 58 citations

From OpenAlex, as of 18 October 2026.

  1. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers rose from 2% to 32%Includes Allen Institute for AI (Ai2). We estimate where leading AI researchers worked when their most-cited papers appeared. The company share rose from 2% in 1975–1979 to 32% in 2020–2024.
  2. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Allen Institute for AI (Ai2). Our estimates of combined and median h-index at AI organizations, using current affiliations and OpenAlex records.
  3. 44% of AI career moves go from one university to anotherIncludes Allen Institute for AI (Ai2). We estimate how 12,174 AI career moves link universities, companies, labs and government research centers, with net flows and the most common paths.
  4. Stanford University trained or employed 27 of the 112 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes University of Maryland. Stanford University trained or employed 27 of the 112 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and employment links for major-prize and best-paper winners.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Allyson Ettinger yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Allyson Ettinger aetting.github.io. Checked 18 October 2026.
  2. NAACL: Nations of the Americas Chapter of the ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics) naacl.org. Checked 18 October 2026.
  3. New Faculty Fall 2019 | University of Chicago Arts & Humanities ahd.uchicago.edu. Checked 18 October 2026.
  4. What BERT Is Not: Lessons from a New Suite of Psycholinguistic Diagnostics for Language Models aclanthology.org. Checked 18 October 2026.
  5. WildGuard: Open One-stop Moderation Tools for Safety Risks, Jailbreaks, and Refusals of LLMs proceedings.neurips.cc. Checked 18 October 2026.
  6. Olmo 3 arxiv.org. Checked 18 October 2026.
  7. Public AI Seminar | Public AI Network publicai.network. Checked 18 October 2026.