I’m a third-year PhD student in Computer Science at Purdue University advised by Dr. Abulhair Saparov . I’m interested in projects broadly related to the world modeling abilities of LLMs. This is something you typically see studied in game-like environments, but I’d like to see what happens when you shift this paradigm to other domains. I intend to explore this in social reasoning and document understanding problems. Read more about my thoughts for future research here.

Education

• Purdue University, PhD in Computer Science (2023 - Present)
• Pomona College, B.A in Comptuter Science & Mathematics (2019-2023)

Publications:

• Language Models Might Not Understand You: Evaluating Theory of Mind via Story Prompting

  Nathaniel Getachew, Abulhair Saparov

  Social Simulation with LLMs Workshop @ COLM 2025 | (Spotlight Award, Oral Presentation)

• Undergraduate Thesis: Latent Dirichlet Allocation: Topic Modeling and Automatically Ranking Topics

  Advised by Dr. Gabriel Chandler

Contact

• Email: ngetach [AT] purdue [DOT] edu
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/nathanielgetachew
• GitHub: github.com/ngetachew

Hobbies and Interests

Outside of my academic pursuits, I enjoy running and playing guitar. I ran for the Pomona Pitzer and Purdue Track & Cross Country Teams. Chirp Chirp, and Boiler Up!

Feel free to reach out if you want to discuss research, collaboration, or just have a chat!