Luke Hewitt

Personal website: https://lukehewitt.info

Luke Hewitt works on computational & experimental tools for measuring what changes people’s beliefs/attitudes, with application to public health communication, effective advocacy, social science methodology, and AI safety. His research combines RCTs, LLMs, expert forecasting and hierarchical Bayesian models.

Luke is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, collaborating with the Polarization and Social Change lab. In addition, he is the co-founder and director of Rhetorical, a research collective dedicated to aiding public communication campaigns in running experiments to enhance the persuasive impact of their messaging. His role as co-PI for the SSRC Mercury Project team involves tackling health misinformation with community-crafted messaging. His PhD, advised by Josh Tenenbaum of MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences, was primarily focused on the development of scalable Bayesian methods for explainable AI. His thesis entailed conducting the largest RCT meta-analysis of political advertisements to date, in collaboration with David Broockman, Alex Coppock, and Ben Tappin.