Zezhen (Dawn) He

I am a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT Sloan's Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE). My research investigates how people perceive, evaluate, and interact with AI — combining behavioral experiments and methodological advances to improve human–AI collaborative outcomes.

My work primarily focuses on:

• Human-AI interaction — understanding how people use, trust, and respond to AI in decision-making.

• Human-AI alignment and personalization — studying how AI systems can better align with user characteristics.

• AI agent interactions

• Interpretable and explainable AI — developing algorithmic methods that help users understand model predictions and why predictions differ across cases, improving the transparency of AI.

I received my PhD in Operations Management from the University of Rochester's Simon Business School, advised by Professor Yaron Shaposhnik (University of Rochester), Professor León Valdés (University of Pittsburgh), and Professor Fernanda Bravo (UCLA). In 2022-2023, I was a visiting PhD student at UCLA Anderson's DOTM group. Previously, I earned a Master's degree in Applied Economics and Management from Cornell University and a Bachelor's degree from Vanderbilt University, where I double-majored in Economics and Mathematics.