Ian Steenstra, Ph.D.

Co-Founder, Head of AI Research & Engineering at One Small Step

About Me

Ian Steenstra

I am a research scientist and engineer focused on the safe, clinical application of generative AI. Currently, I am the Co-Founder and Head of AI Research & Engineering at One Small Step, leading our mission toward safe and reliable AI solutions for mental healthcare.

Experience

Co-Founder, Head of AI Research & Engineering January 2026 - Present
One Small Step
Leading our company's mission toward safe and reliable AI solutions for mental healthcare.
Graduate Research Assistant (Ph.D.) September 2022 - December 2025
Northeastern University

Research focused on the safe, clinical application of Generative AI, culminating in the development, deployment, and clinical validation of counseling agents.

  • 🤖 Agentic AI: Engineered multi-modal generative agents (LLMs, Robotics, Avatars) for health interventions. Investigated the evolution of relational dynamics between humans and AI over time to optimize for therapeutic outcomes.
  • ⚕️Clinical Grounding: Validated agent behavior through human-subject experiments with patients and clinical professionals.
  • 🚨 Simulated Stress-Testing: Created automated evaluation frameworks utilizing multi-agent user simulators. Applied cognitive-affective modeling to fine-tune LLMs, improving safety against adversarial or high-risk patient inputs.
  • 🏆 Best Paper Award (ACM IVA 2024): Recognized for groundbreaking work on LLM-powered motivational interviewing for substance abuse.
Software Engineer II March 2022 - September 2022
Wayfair

Architected distributed services for a notification platform delivering billions of personalized messages annually.

  • ☁️ Cloud Migration: Led my team's migration of legacy monoliths to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) microservices, improving reliability and observability.
  • 🥇 Innovation: Winner of Company-Wide Hackathon (1st Place) for "Dynamic Pricing in Emails."
Software Engineer I October 2020 - March 2022
Wayfair
Freelance Machine Learning Engineer June 2020 - September 2020
Upwork
To stay productive during the COVID pandemic, I executed rapid-prototype machine learning projects for diverse clients (e.g., computer vision, time-series forecasting).
Undergraduate Research Assistant September 2016 - May 2020
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Developed multimodal AI systems (VQA, BiGRUs) to power interactive avatars for the IBM/RPI "Mandarin Project." [video]

  • 🖥️ Enabled avatars to perform open-domain scene understanding within a 360° immersive classroom, successfully deployed for the university’s first AI-assisted language course.
  • 💡 Previous RPI Roles: Research Team Lead for CURENT (Smart Grid Tech), RPI Engineering Ambassador.
Software Engineer Intern June 2019 - August 2019
Wayfair
Engineered a multi-armed bandit recommendation system that drove $300k+ in daily incremental revenue. Work led to a RecSys '23 publication.
Data Analytics Engineer Intern May 2018 - August 2018
Pratt & Whitney
Developed machine learning models to optimize failure detection for jet engine airfoils, contributing to an automated quality assurance system deployed across manufacturing lines.

Publications

2025
An Evaluation Framework for Assessing Quality of Care & Risk in AI Psychotherapy.
Steenstra, I.
Ph.D. Dissertation, Northeastern University. [paper][defense]
2025
A Risk Ontology for Evaluating AI-Powered Psychotherapy Virtual Agents.
Steenstra, I. & Bickmore, T.
ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA). [paper]
2025
Scaffolding Empathy: Training Counselors with Simulated Patients and Utterance-level Performance Visualizations.
Steenstra, I., Nouraei, F., & Bickmore, T.
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. [paper][talk][demo][prompts]
2024
Virtual agents for alcohol use counseling: Exploring LLM-powered motivational interviewing.
Steenstra, I., Nouraei, F., Arjmand, M., & Bickmore, T.
ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA). (Best Paper Award 🏆) [paper][prompts]
2024
Empathic Grounding: Explorations using Multimodal Interaction and Large Language Models with Conversational Agents.
Arjmand, M., Nouraei, F., Steenstra, I., & Bickmore, T.
ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA). [paper]
2024
Engaging and Entertaining Adolescents in Health Education Using LLM-Generated Fantasy Narrative Games and Virtual Agents.
Steenstra, I., Murali, P., Perkins, R. B., Joseph, N., Paasche-Orlow, M. K., & Bickmore, T.
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. [paper]
2023
Changing Parent Attitudes Towards HPV Vaccination by Including Adolescents in Multiparty Counseling using Virtual Agents.
Steenstra, I., Murali, P., Perkins, R., Joseph, N., Paasche-Orlow, M., Bickmore, T.
ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA). [paper]
2023
Improving multiparty interactions with a robot using large language models.
Murali, P., Steenstra, I., Sun Yun, H., Shamekhi, A., Bickmore, T.
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. [paper]
2020
Multimodal Dialogue State Tracking By QA Approach with Data Augmentation.
Mou, X., Sigouin, B., Steenstra, I., Su, H.
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. (Workshop Paper) [paper]
2019
Evolution of Activities in a Smart Grid Summer Camp for High School STEM Students (Evaluation).
Douglas, D. J., Steenstra, I. S., et al.
ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition. [paper][videos]

Portfolio & Projects

Conscious AI

Cognitive AI & Self-Identity Modeling

Cognitive Architecture, AI Alignment

Exploring theories behind simulated consciousness and dynamic self-identities in AI. Features multi-head cognitive attention and hierarchical self-models.

Code
AI Social Media

Generative AI Content Creator

Generative AI, Social Media

Creating viral Veo 3 videos with prompt + AI editing workflows; scaled a cross-platform brand to 120k+ subscribers and 200M+ organic views.

Art Therapy Game

AI Art Therapy Game

Generative AI, Unreal Engine 5

3D interactive environment where an LLM-driven NPC guides users through art therapy, dynamically generating 3D assets in real-time based on the user’s emotional state.

Code Demo
RLAIF

RLAIF with User Simulations

LLMs, Reinforcement Learning

Developed a novel Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback framework that utilizes simulated users with cognitive-affective models to fine-tune dialogue agents in real-time (online, on-policy).

Code
SimPatient

Embodied Clinical AI (Furhat Robotics)

LLMs, Robotics, Affective Computing

Engineered a physical robotic patient for in-person counselor training. Integrated GPT-4o with appraisal theory to generate real-time emotions and non-verbal behaviors, bridging high-latency LLM inference with low-latency robotic control.

Code
HPV Game

LLM Fantasy Narrative Games

Generative AI, Games for Health

Developed a methodology for rapidly creating physician-validated health education games for adolescents (e.g., HPV vaccination) using virtual agents and LLMs.

Publication
Alcohol Agent

LLM Alcohol Counselor

LLMs, Motivational Interviewing

Virtual counselor capable of conducting motivational interviewing (MI) for alcohol use counseling using LLMs.

Publication
PeerSupport

PeerSupport / TherapyNow

Web Dev, Safety Systems, Leadership

Led a 10-person team to build an anonymous peer-support platform (Django, React, Redis, Docker). Architected real-time safety workflows with user flagging and counselor review dashboards; won RPI’s “Change the World Challenge.”

Code Startup Pitch
SAFEWheel

SAFEWheel

Circuitry, Computer Vision

Built a computer-vision hardware system (Raspberry Pi + Google Cloud Vision) to detect distracted driving via hand position and eye closure; featured in Google’s internal newsletter.

Code Demo
HackRPI

HackRPI

Leadership, Event Organizing

Revived and led RPI's annual hackathon, growing it to 400+ attendees and partnering with major tech sponsors.

Website Recap

Education

Ph.D. Computer Science September 2022 - December 2025
Northeastern University
Advisor: Dr. Timothy Bickmore
B.S. Computer & Systems Engineering May 2017 - May 2020
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI)
Advisors: Dr. Hui Su, Dr. Joe H. Chow, Dr. Alhussein Abouzeid

Skills & Competencies

🚀 Leadership & Collaboration

Technical Strategy, Project Management, Teaching/Mentoring, Customer-First Mindset, Cross-Functional Teamwork, Stakeholder Alignment, Communication, Partnership Building, Product-Research Alignment, Agile

💻 Languages

Python, Java, PHP, C/C#/C++, Kotlin, R, TypeScript, JavaScript, SQL

✏️ AI & Conversation Agents

LLM Agents (GPT-5, Gemini), RAG, LangChain, Multi-Agent Systems, Prompt & Context Engineering, RLHF / RLAIF, Test-Time Compute, Conversational/Embodied AI, AI Alignment & Risk Assessment, Simulated Users, Cognitive Architectures

🧠 Machine Learning & Data Science

PyTorch, Hugging Face, Transformers, TensorFlow, Scikit-learn, XGBoost, Gensim, NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, NLTK, Matplotlib, Google Vertex AI

☁️ Big Data & Cloud

Google Cloud (BigQuery, BigTable, Pub/Sub), Apache Spark, Hadoop, Hive, MapReduce, Kafka, ZooKeeper, Akka, Storm

🔀 Data Pipelines & DevOps

PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Aerospike, MS SQL Server, PowerMTA, SparkSQL, Airflow, Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins, Buildkite, Git, Datadog, Grafana, Kibana, PagerDuty, Microservices

🌐 Full-Stack & Tools

Django, React, FastAPI, Swagger, Servlet, MVC, Spring Boot, Maven, Guice, JUnit, Mockito, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, IntelliJ, PyCharm, Jupyter Notebook

🎓 Interdisciplinary & Creative

Psychology, Cognitive Science, Personal Health Informatics, Furhat Robotics, Google Veo 3, Unity Engine, Unreal Engine 5

Virtual Coffee Chat

If you'd like to connect, feel free to grab a time on my calendar for a virtual coffee chat.

Schedule a Coffee Chat