Emma Bortz

(she/her)

Technical Community Outreach and Education Manager

Education

  • PhD in Biomedical Engineering, Boston University
  • BS in Biomedical Engineering, Tulane University

Biography

Emma Bortz is the National Deep Inference Fabric (NDIF) technical outreach manager in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, based in Boston.

Bortz organizes technical workshops, develops user diversification plans, and creates social media and web content for NDIF, a Northeastern-based, NSF-funded research project that aims to explain how large language models arrive at their predictions. She began her role in 2024, excited to contribute to AI interpretability research and impressed by the welcoming community she found at Khoury College. She is particularly passionate about facilitating interdisciplinary research into AI internal states.

Bortz began managing technical outreach while pursuing her PhD in biomedical engineering at Boston University. In addition to serving as a leadership member for the life sciences education and entrepreneurship nonprofit Nucleate and helping them to launch an inclusivity program, Bortz also ran a graduate/undergraduate mentoring program for women in STEM at BU. Along the way, she researched how ultrasound alters the activity of neurons inside the brain.

In her free time, Bortz enjoys skiing, hiking, and camping, as well as reading and fiber arts.