The Shipley School is proud to honor David Wadden ’06 as the recipient of the 2026 Young Alumni Award. A researcher at the forefront of artificial intelligence, Dave has built a career defined by intellectual curiosity, rigorous scholarship, and a commitment to making AI more accurate and trustworthy — qualities that were evident long before he left Shipley. As a senior, he was recognized with the Senior Scholarship Award, the Anne Garrett Buck Memorial Award, and the Esther Forbes Russell Award, a distinction that foreshadowed the academic excellence he would go on to achieve.

Dave earned his B.A. in Physics with distinction from Amherst College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, before going on to earn his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington. His doctoral research focused on knowledge-intensive natural language processing — in particular, developing systems that can verify scientific claims and reason accurately over complex bodies of literature. That work, motivated by a desire to make information more reliable and accessible, earned him multiple best paper awards at leading AI conferences.

After completing his PhD, Dr. Wadden joined the Allen Institute for AI, where he worked on OLMo 2, one of the first major open-source AI language models, and continued his research on making AI systems more reliable and easier to fact-check. He is now a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, where he works on improving Google Gemini — focused on improving the model's ability to reason and act effectively across complex, multi-step tasks.