Yara Al Khalifa is a senior at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School in Cambridge, Massachusetts and iFp Emerging Innovator at Innovators for Purpose (iFp) in Cambridge, Mass. She is passionate about the intersection of artificial intelligence and youth empowerment.

Yara led an initiative at Fletcher-Maynard Academy to teach elementary schoolers about AI, designing workshops that introduced machine learning and ethical technology use through interactive, age-appropriate activities.

Building on this work, at iFp she led the development of a large language model-based chatbot for teen mental health, focusing on creating safe, supportive, and adaptive tools for her peers. Her project emphasizes accessibility, bias mitigation, and fostering open conversations about mental well-being. To create the chatbot, her work included exploring the creation of instruction-following models via supervised learning. Then, her team fine-tuned the chatbot with custom dialogues to respond in the desired manner.

Looking ahead, Yara aims to explore how AI can be ethically integrated into teen spaces—from classrooms to digital communities—ensuring technology serves to foster understanding and connection.