Eli Laird

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Eli LairdPhD Student @ Southern Methodist University

Exploring world models grounded in physics

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Physics-Grounded World Models

Researching scalable, robust world models for continuous control by integrating Newtonian inductive biases.

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Graph Representation Learning

Applying self-supervised learning and GNNs to complex challenges in quantum chemistry and drug discovery.

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Dallas AI Community

Volunteer Program Lead for the Dallas AI Summer Program, mentoring 150+ students and practitioners.

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Biometrics & Fairness

Developing synthetic generation pipelines and fairness metrics to audit and improve face recognition systems.

About Me ​

I'm a PhD student at Southern Methodist University specializing in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. My main research focus is on making world models more robust and scalable for real-world, continuous control tasks.

Alongside my core research, I actively explore:

  • Self-supervised learning on graph-structured data.
  • Explainable AI (XAI) for scientific discovery.
  • Biometrics, specifically focusing on bias mitigation and synthetic data generation.

Dallas AI ​

I serve as the Volunteer Program Lead for the Dallas AI community. We aim to provide a hands-on introduction to AI for students and professionals in the Dallas area.

I co-lead the Dallas AI Summer Program, an 8-week bootcamp where participants hear from industry experts and build their own AI-based projects. Since launching in 2024, we have grown to over 150 participants and anticipate hosting 200+ participants in Summer 2026.

Recent Publications & Presentations ​