I am a PhD candidate at Stanford University studying the relations between higher education and the technology industry. My ethnographic dissertation examines how a group of academic computer science research labs engage with rising industry power. I have also published mixed-methods work on language ideologies and AI adoption for scientific writing, and have a long-standing interest in how English hegemony intertwines with innovation and adoption of new media technologies. My research has been published in ACM FAccT (Best paper award 2025), Nature Human Behavior, and The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (forthcoming), among other venues.
Prior to my PhD, I worked as an Natural Language Processing engineer on the TOEFL, and built digital education programs for students in Jordan, Iraq, and the United States. I hold an M.S. in Computational Linguistics from the University of Washington and an M.A. in Sociology from Stanford.
I am the chief union steward for graduate workers in Stanford’s Education School, Law School, and Business School. I love learning languages and am currently practicing Shami Arabic and Latin American Spanish.
hlepp at <university> dot edu