BIO

SALONI DASH

I am currently a PhD candidate at the Information School at the University of Washington (UW), where I work with Prof. Emma Spiro and Prof. Aylin Caliskan. My research focuses on understanding the social and psychological impacts of AI in online information environments and draws from multiple disciplines, including information science, social computing, natural language processing, and psychology.  My work has been published at top-tier venues including PNAS Nexus, ACL, EMNLP, AIES, and ICWSM. I have been involved in the development of and supported by several research grants, including a $500,000 Schmidt Sciences grant supporting work on trustworthy AI, an award from UW’s Population Health Initiative, and a Center for an Informed Public’s Innovation Award.

Previously, I was a Research Fellow at Microsoft Research (MSR) India, working with Joyojeet Pal, Amit Sharma, and Monojit Choudhury, and a Research Intern at MSR Redmond, mentored by Madeleine Daepp.

To learn more about my research, you can check out the RESEARCH section. 

Latest Updates
Latest Updates
July, 2026: Our paper "Persona-Assigned Large Language Models Exhibit Human-Like Motivated Reasoning" was accepted to Findings of ACL 2026!
November, 2025: Our paper "Anecdoctoring: Automated Red-Teaming Across Language and Place" was published at EMNLP 2025!
October, 2025: Our proposal on Large Language Model Safety in Inference-Time Motivated Reasoning was awarded a $500,000 Schmidt Sciences Science of Trustworthy AI Grant!
October, 2025: Selected to participate in the Doctoral Consortium at the 2025 Summit on Responsible Computing, AI, and Society in Atlanta, with flights, lodging, and other travel expenses covered!
October, 2025: Awarded a travel scholarship to present our poster "Persona-Assigned Large Language Models Exhibit Human-Like Motivated Reasoning" at the Social Simulation with LLMs Workshop at COLM!
July, 2025: Our paper on AIPasta "The persuasive potential of AI-paraphrased information at scale" was published at PNAS Nexus!
November 2024: Received my 500th citation on Google Scholar!
October 2024: Awarded the Tier 1 Pilot Research Grant from the Population Health Department at UW.
June - September, 2024: Interned at Microsoft Research Redmond.
March, 2024: Ran my first 10K at the Cherry Blossom Run in Seattle!
March, 2024: Awarded the Innovation Fund by the Center for an Informed Public (CIP) at UW.
February, 2022: Awarded the UW Graduate School Top Scholar Fellowship by the Information School at UW.
February, 2022: Admitted to the Ph.D. Program in Information Science at UW iSchool.
Timeline
Vitae
  • University of Washington 2022 - present
    Information School, PhD Student
  • MSR Redmond Summer 2024
    Special Projects, Research Intern
  • MSR India 2020 - 2022
    Social Media & Society, Research Fellow
  • BITS Pilani 2015 - 2020
    M.Sc. Mathematics & B.E. Computer Science

RESEARCH

Please look at my google scholar profile for a comprehensive list.

Saloni Dash, Amélie Reymond, Emma S. Spiro, Aylin Caliskan “Persona-Assigned Large Language Models Exhibit Human-Like Motivated Reasoning” Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026

Alejandro Cuevas, Saloni Dash, Bharat Kumar Nayak, Dan Vann, Madeleine I. G. Daepp “Anecdoctoring: Automated Red-Teaming Across Language and Place” Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2025

Saloni Dash, Yiwei Xu, Madeline Jalbert, Emma S. Spiro “The Persuasive Potential of AI-Paraphrased Information at Scale” PNAS Nexus 2025

Saloni Dash, Arshia Arya, Sukhnidh Kaur, Joyojeet Pal “Narrative Building in Propaganda Networks on Indian Twitter” ACM Web Science Conference 2022

[Hon. Mention for Best Paper Award] Saloni Dash, Rynaa Grover, Gazal Shekhawat, Sukhnidh Kaur, Dibyendu Mishra, Joyojeet Pal “Insights Into Incitement: A Computational Perspective of Dangerous Speech on Twitter in India ” ACM Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies (COMPASS) 2022 

Saloni Dash, Vineeth Balasubramanian, Amit Sharma “Evaluating and Mitigating Bias in Image Classifiers: A Causal Perspective Using Counterfactuals” IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) 2022

Saloni Dash, Dibyendu Mishra, Gazal Shekhawat, Joyojeet Pal “Divided We Rule: Influencer Polarization on Twitter During Political Crises in IndiaInternational Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) 2022

[Workshop Paper] Saloni Dash, Gazal Shekhawat, Syeda Zainab Akbar, Joyojeet Pal Extremism & Whataboutism: A Case Study on Bangalore Riots Extremism Reserach Workshop, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 2021 

[Workshop PaperSaloni Dash, Amit Sharma. “Counterfactual Generation and Fairness Evaluation using Adversarially Learned Inference”. Explainable Agency in Artificial Intelligence Workshop, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 2021

[Workshop PaperSaloni Dash, Ritik Dutta, Isabelle Guyon, Adrien Pavao, Andrew Yale, Kristin P. Bennett “Synthetic Event Time Series Health Data Generation” Machine Learning For Health (ML4H) Workshop, Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2019

Andrew Yale, Saloni Dash, Ritik Dutta, Isabelle Guyon, Adrien Pavao, Kristin P. Bennett Generation and Evaluation of Privacy Preserving Synthetic Health Data Journal of Neurocomputing

You can download my regularly updated CV

CONTACT