I completed my Ph.D. at Yale under the wonderful mentorship of Arman Cohan and will be joining Stanford to work on legal reasoning. I’m interested in both legal formalism, the idea that law is a structured, rule-based system, and legal realism, which reminds us that law is ultimately a human and social process.

Previously, I interned at Legacy Google Brain, Legacy Google Research, Meta FAIR and AWS, where I worked with fantastic teams to advance reasoning capabilities in large language models.

I am fortunate to be supported by my wonderful thesis committee and informal mentors from diverse backgrounds and disciplines in my academic journey: R. Thomas McCoy, Ruzica Piskac, Scott Shapiro, Yoshiki Takashima, Denny Zhou, Kathy Mckeown, Alex Lew, Pan Lu, Jiayuan Mao, Shafiq Rayhan Joty, Tu Vu.

I completed my B.Eng Computer Science degree in Nanyang Technological University, Singapore where I was awarded the Best Final Year Thesis Gold Medal.

Selected Publications

• Creativity or Brute Force? Using Brainteasers as a Window into the Problem-Solving Abilities of Large Language Models
  Sophia Simeng Han, Stephen Xia, Grant Zhang, Howard Dai, Chen Liu, Lichang Chen, Hoang Huy Nguyen, Hongyuan Mei, Jiayuan Mao, R. Thomas McCoy.
  NeurIPS 2025. MIT Technology Review Coverage
• CourtReasoner: Can LLM Agents Reason Like Judges?
  Sophia Simeng Han, Shannon Zejiang Shen, Chen Liu, Yixin Liu, Roque K. Thuo, Sonia Knowlton, Ruzica Piskac, Scott J Shapiro, Arman Cohan
  EMNLP 2025.
• Learning to Reason via Mixture-of-Thoughts for Logical Reasoning
  Tong Zheng*, Lichang Chen*, Sophia Simeng Han, R. Thomas McCoy, and Heng Huang
• HYBRIDMIND: Meta Selection of Natural Language and Symbolic Language for Enhanced LLM Reasoning
  Sophia Simeng Han*, Tianyu Liu*, Chuhan Li*, Xuyuan Xiong, Arman Cohan
  COLM 2025 The First Workshop on the Application of LLM Explainability to Reasoning and Planning
• ATEB: Evaluating and Improving Advanced NLP Tasks for Text Embedding Models
  Sophia Simeng Han, Frank Palma Gomez, Tu Vu, Zefei Li, Daniel Cer, Hansi Zeng, Chris Tar, Arman Cohan, Gustavo Hernandez Abrego
  ACL 2025 Workshop: Towards Knowledgeable Foundation Models
• Towards Artificial Intelligence Research Assistant for Expert-Involved Learning
  Tianyu Liu*, Sophia Simeng Han*, Xiao Luo, Hanchen Wang, Pan Lu, Biqing Zhu, Yuge Wang, Keyi Li, Jiapeng Chen, Rihao Qu, Yufeng Liu, Xinyue Cui, Aviv Yaish, Yuhang Chen, Minsheng Hao, Chuhan Li, Kexing Li, Arman Cohan, Hua Xu, Mark Gerstein, James Zou, Hongyu Zhao
• FOLIO: Natural Language Reasoning with First-Order Logic
  Sophia Simeng Han, Hailey Schoelkopf, Yilun Zhao, Zhenting Qi, Martin Riddell, Wenfei Zhou, James Coady, David Peng, Yujie Qiao, Luke Benson, Lucy Sun, Alex Wardle-Solano, Hannah Szabo, Ekaterina Zubova, Matthew Burtell, Jonathan Fan, Yixin Liu, Brian Wong, Malcolm Sailor, Ansong Ni, Linyong Nan, Jungo Kasai, Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Alexander R. Fabbri, Wojciech Kryscinski, Semih Yavuz, Ye Liu, Xi Victoria Lin, Shafiq Joty, Yingbo Zhou, Caiming Xiong, Rex Ying, Arman Cohan, Dragomir Radev
  EMNLP 2024 (Video presentation).
• P-FOLIO: Evaluating and Improving Logical Reasoning with Abundant Human-Written Reasoning Chains
  Sophia Simeng Han, Aaron Yu, Rui Shen, Zhenting Qi, Martin Riddell, Wenfei Zhou, Yujie Qiao, Yilun Zhao, Semih Yavuz, Ye Liu, Shafiq Joty, Yingbo Zhou, Caiming Xiong, Dragomir Radev, Rex Ying, Arman Cohan
  EMNLP 2024 (Video presentation)
• Scheherazade: Evaluating Chain-of-Thought Math Reasoning in LLMs with Chain-of-Problems
  Stephen Miner, Yoshiki Takashima, Sophia Simeng Han, Ferhat Erata, Timos Antonopoulos, Ruzica Piskac, Scott J Shapiro
  
• Straight to the Gradient: Learning to Use Novel Tokens for Neural Text Generation
  Xiang Lin, Simeng (Sophia) Han, Shafiq Joty
  ICML’21 (as long talk ~3%)
• Improving Zero and Few-Shot Abstractive Summarization with Intermediate Fine-tuning and Data Augmentation
  Alexander Fabbri, Simeng (Sophia) Han, Haoyuan Li, Haoran Li, Marjan Ghazvininejad, Shafiq Joty, Dragomir Radev, Yashar Mehdad
  NAACL’21

Awards

• Meta Research Grant 2024 on Complex Reasoning.
• SM2 Scholarship, a full scholarship issued by Ministry of Education and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
• National Physics Olympiad Second Prize, China.
• Terrainier NUS Hackathon Top-8
• Climate Oracle Yale-NUS hack4climate Datathon 2nd Place in the Data Science Category
• Blinkception NTU Hackathon 2nd Prize

Recent talks

From First Principles to Real-World Applications: Advancing LLM Reasoning from Logic to Law. Invited talk at Rice University, September 2025.
From First Principles to Real-World Applications: Advancing LLM Reasoning from Logic to Law. Invited talk at Google Deepmind, August 2025.
Advancing Reasoning in Large Language Models: from Fundamentals to Real-World Applications. Invited talk at CMU, April 2025.
Advancing Reasoning in Large Language Models: from Fundamentals to Real-World Applications. Invited talk at UCSD, Nov 2024.
Advancing Reasoning in Large Language Models: from Fundamentals to Real-World Applications. Thesis prospectus talk at Yale, May 2024.

Teaching

• Teaching fellow: Topics in Natural Language Processing at Yale.
• Teaching fellow: AI Foundation Models at Yale.

Services and Organization

• Organizing Committee: MATH-AI: The 5th Workshop on Mathematical Reasoning and AI at NeurIPS 2025.
• Organizing Committee: Knowledge-Intensive Multimodal Reasoning at ICCV 2025.
• Chair: Widening NLP.
• General Chair: New England NLP (NENLP) 2025.
• Session Chair: BoF session on Complex Reasoning with LLMs at NAACL 2025.
• Organizing Committee: Yale AI4Research Meeting Seminar.
• Ogannizing Committee: Automatic Summarization for Creative Writing Workshop at COLING 22
• Reviewer: ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML.
• Member: Yale Women in School of Engineering & Applied Science.

Miscellaneous

• I was a student of the wonderful Dragomir Radev.
• Book list: Thinking Like a Lawyer by Frederick Schauer, Elements of Law, an Introduction to Metaphysics.
• I had the privilege of performing in an ensemble at Yale’s historic Woolsey Hall.
• I have lived in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Los Angeles, Singapore, New Haven, New York, Mountain View, San Diego, Palo Alto, Redwood City and Jersey City.
• Open Source Society Technical Director, Hackers for Charity Subcommittee