PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Dora Zhao

Also known as Dorothy Zhao

Dora Zhao is a computer science PhD student at Stanford whose research examines bias and diversity in AI datasets and gives communities a say in how language models are built. At Princeton she worked with Olga Russakovsky on racial bias in image captioning, and at Sony AI she was an AI Engineer on the Ethics flagship project and wrote the ICML 2024 Best Paper Award winner "Position: Measure Dataset Diversity, Don't Just Claim It". In 2025, she received a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, coauthored a study of AI companions and well-being, and appeared among the authors of Sony AI's FHIBE fairness benchmark in Nature. She is a PhD student in Stanford's HCI and NLP groups, co-advised by Michael Bernstein and Diyi Yang, and started a part-time internship at Microsoft in January 2026.

Now at
Microsoft
Badges

Timeline

  1. By 2021

    Bias audits at Princeton

    She studies computer science at Princeton, graduating summa cum laude in the Class of 2021 with certificates in Statistics and Machine Learning and in Asian American Studies, and also completes a master's there. Under Olga Russakovsky, she audits facial recognition software for how well it reads emotion across demographic groups. Her 2021 ICCV paper with Angelina Wang and Russakovsky annotates the perceived gender and skin color of 28,315 people in the COCO dataset and finds that captions differ between images of lighter- and darker-skinned people.

  2. 2023

    AI engineer at Sony AI

    She works as an AI Engineer on the Ethics flagship project at Sony AI. In 2023, she publishes "Men Also Do Laundry: Multi-Attribute Bias Amplification" at ICML with Jerone Andrews and Alice Xiang.

  3. 2024

    An ICML Best Paper

    "Position: Measure Dataset Diversity, Don't Just Claim It", written with Jerone Andrews, Orestis Papakyriakopoulos and Alice Xiang, wins a Best Paper Award at ICML in 2024. It draws on her work at Sony AI and examines "diversity" across 135 image and text datasets, applying measurement theory to recommend how to conceptualize, operationalize and evaluate it. She is a PhD student at the Stanford AI Lab when the award is announced.

  4. 2024

    A taxonomy of dataset curation

    As a PhD student in the HCI and NLP groups at Stanford, advised by Michael Bernstein and Diyi Yang, she coauthors "A Taxonomy of Challenges to Curating Fair Datasets", an oral at NeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks in 2024. The taxonomy draws on interviews with 30 ML dataset curators, and she presents it at the University of British Columbia in December 2024.

  5. 2025

    A Soros Fellowship

    She is named a 2025 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow for New Americans, one of 30 fellows selected from over 2,600 applicants. The fellowship supports her computer science PhD at Stanford, where her work focuses on technical systems that give communities control over the design and creation of large language models.

  6. June 2025

    Studying AI companions

    In June 2025, she coauthors "The Rise of AI Companions: Interaction with AI Companions and Psychological Well-being" with Yutong Zhang, Jeffrey T. Hancock, Robert Kraut and Diyi Yang. The study surveys 1,131 U.S. adults who use CharacterAI and analyzes 4,664 chat sessions from 237 participants.

  7. November 2025

    The FHIBE fairness benchmark

    In November 2025, Nature publishes "Fair human-centric image dataset for ethical AI benchmarking" by Alice Xiang and a Sony AI team that includes her. The paper introduces FHIBE, a consensually collected fairness evaluation dataset of 10,318 images of 1,981 individuals from 81 countries and areas.

  8. As of October 2026

    Stanford PhD and Microsoft internship

    She is a PhD student in the HCI and NLP groups at Stanford, co-advised by Michael Bernstein and Diyi Yang, with research supported by the Brown Institute for Media Innovation and the Soros Fellowship. In January 2026, she starts a part-time internship at Microsoft in the IDEAS group, working on upskilling workers.

Career

  1. Since 2026MicrosoftPart-time Intern
  2. 2023SonyAI Engineer

Education

  1. 2021Princeton UniversityUndergraduate degree
  2. Stanford UniversityPhD student

From the biography.

  1. 23% of people shaping AI who left a university for a company later returned to a universityIncludes Dora Zhao. We estimate that 468 of the 2,011 people shaping AI who left a university for a company (23%) later returned to a university after a median of 5 years, and 163 of 829 (20%) made the reverse round trip.
  2. 84% of people shaping AI with recorded undergraduate and doctoral schools changed institutions for their doctorateIncludes Dora Zhao. 84% of people shaping AI with recorded undergraduate and doctoral schools changed institutions for their doctorate. Across 2,116 people with both an undergraduate degree and a doctorate recorded, we trace which undergraduate schools feed which doctoral programs, how often students stay at the same school, and how paths differ by birth-country region.
  3. Among employers with 30+ full-time cases, OpenAI leads primary technical role H-1B pay at $310,000, and Amazon, Google and Microsoft file 57% of all casesIncludes Microsoft. Across 440,669 certified US H-1B filings from 44 employers (FY2020–FY2026), OpenAI leads primary technical role base pay at $310,000 and xAI leads overall base pay at $290,000.
  4. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Includes Microsoft. Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI each year from 1955 to 2025, tracing the shift from university labs to companies.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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

  1. Dora Zhao: auditing artificial intelligence for bias | CS (Princeton Computer Science) cs.princeton.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Understanding and Evaluating Racial Biases in Image Captioning (arXiv:2106.08503) arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Dora Zhao – Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans pdsoros.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Dora Zhao (personal homepage) dorazhao99.github.io. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Dora Zhao: selected publications dorazhao99.github.io. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Congratulations to Stanford AI Lab PhD student Dora Zhao for an ICML 2024 Best Paper Award! – Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory ai.stanford.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. ICML 2024 Awards icml.cc. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. Position: Measure Dataset Diversity, Don't Just Claim It (arXiv:2407.08188) arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. SEDI Seminar Series: Dora Zhao | UBC Statistics stat.ubc.ca. Checked 21 October 2026.
  10. Dora Zhao – Brown Institute brown.stanford.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  11. Princeton graduates Max Gotts and Dora Zhao named 2025 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellows | Princeton International international.princeton.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  12. The Rise of AI Companions: Interaction with AI Companions and Psychological Well-being (arXiv:2506.12605) arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  13. Fair human-centric image dataset for ethical AI benchmarking | Nature nature.com. Checked 21 October 2026.