Dr. Sayash Kapoor has been appointed as an assistant professor at UC Berkeley. His new position will start in July 2027.
Kapoor joins us from Princeton University, where he recently earned his doctorate in computer science. He is also an author, co-writing a book titled AI Snake Oil — which was named one of Nature’s Top 10 Books of the Year — and was featured in Time Magazine's "100 Most Influential People in AI". Between graduating and starting at the I School, he will be writing a second book.
Kapoor’s work develops AI evaluation methods with application to security, science, and policy, focusing on the societal impact of AI. This has included research assessing the risk of open-weights models, developing systems to carry out the large-scale evaluation of AI agents, and building benchmarks to measure and improve computational reproducibility for AI-based science.
Kapoor was also a senior fellow at Mozilla and a Laurance S. Rockefeller Graduate Prize Fellow as well as a Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellow at Princeton University. Earlier this year, he received a Privacy Papers for Policymakers Award at the Future of Privacy Forum for his upcoming book with Princeton professor and computer scientist Arvind Narayanan. He was also just announced as a recipient of the Information Policy Award at the Annual IP3 Awards hosted by non-profit Public Knowledge.
“I am excited about the School of Information’s commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship and conducting research in the public sphere,” said Kapoor. “At Berkeley, I hope to work on empirical research on the impacts of AI on society, improve our conceptual understanding of AI’s impacts on institutions, and collaborate with the fantastic researchers across disciplines who are committed to understanding and improving the relationship between AI and society.”
