About Me
I’m a linguist, AI researcher, interdisciplinary scholar, educator, and founder.
My intellectual foundation is formal linguistics, especially the relationship between structure and meaning, but my work has always moved across boundaries. Over the years, that has taken me through computational linguistics, multilingual and low-resource NLP, narrative analysis, culturally responsive AI, AI evaluation, educational technology, and generative AI.
I’m especially drawn to questions that don’t fit neatly inside one field: problems that require looking at language together with culture, cognition, history, technology, and social context. I tend to be most interested in what is being overlooked — an assumption that needs questioning, a language or community poorly represented in technology, or a connection between ideas that are usually kept separate.
Through the Zoorna Institute for Language, AI, and Society,
I lead research and educational initiatives in multilingual AI, low-resource languages, cultural understanding, linguistic structure, and AI literacy. Much of this work focuses on the languages and communities of the Middle East and the Caucasus.
I also enjoy turning ideas into things: research questions, experiments, prototypes, courses, workshops, collaborations, and sometimes entire organizations.
Across all of this work, I keep returning to the same underlying interests: how meaning is created, how systems represent it, what gets lost in that representation, and who or what gets left at the margins.
That concern with the overlooked, and with the systems that determine who or what gets valued, extends well beyond technology. I have been involved in political activism and social-issue campaigns over the years, experiences that continue to shape how I think about power, institutions, community, and social change. I am also the founder of Artemis House Sanctuary for cats, where those values take a different form through animal rescue, care, and sanctuary building.
Outside of research, I explore creative and nature-centered projects.
Education & Credentials
PhD in Linguistics, University of Southern California (2002)
Dissertation advisor: Jean-Roger Vergnaud
Chief Technology Officer Certification, Wharton Business School, University of Pennsylvania (April 2026)
Chief AI Officer Certification, World AI X University (2025)
Graduate Certificate in Computational Social Science, George Mason University (2017)
Masters in Linguistics, USC (1995)
Secondary specialization in Neural Computation
Bachelor of Science in Physics, USC (1991)
Secondary specialization in French
What I Do
Research & Scholarship
My scholarship spans linguistic theory, computational linguistics, multilingual and low-resource NLP, cultural and pragmatic AI, narrative analysis, language pedagogy, and AI evaluation.
A recurring thread is the relationship between language structure, meaning, culture, and computation: from my early work on Persian complex predicates and computational grammar to current research on culturally responsive AI and the limitations of large language models across languages and communities.
Research Leadership & Applied AI
Across my career, I have led interdisciplinary research that moves between theory, experimentation, and real-world application.
At MITRE, I directed and contributed to multilingual NLP, narrative and social analysis, AI evaluation, and public-sector AI programs, including long-term work with the U.S. federal judiciary. That experience reinforced my interest in research that begins with difficult human problems rather than technology for its own sake.
Research, Access & Advocacy
Through the Zoorna Institute for Language, AI and Society, I develop research, educational programs, tools, and communities around languages and populations historically underserved by mainstream technology.
My work emphasizes not only technical capability, but also representation, cultural understanding, access, and whose languages and knowledge become visible in AI systems.
Teaching & AI Literacy
I have taught linguistics, computational linguistics, social-media analytics, political discourse, and heritage-language education at Georgetown University, UC San Diego, and the American University of Armenia.
I also design AI-literacy programs for nontechnical audiences, with a focus on making complex technologies understandable without either hype or unnecessary technical mystification.
I founded AI4Her to expand access to AI literacy and generative AI education for women.
Intellectual Community
I contribute to the research community as a workshop organizer, reviewer, mentor, grant evaluator, speaker, and convener.
Over the years, I have helped create and sustain communities around computational linguistics, Iranian and Arabic-script languages, multilingual NLP, and culturally responsive and low-resource AI. I founded the Society for Iranian Linguistics, organized workshops on complex predicates and Arabic-script language technologies, and more recently co-created SilkRoadNLP as a dedicated research venue for Iranic languages.
Beyond Academia
I am the founder of Artemis House Sanctuary, a nonprofit sanctuary for rescued and vulnerable cats.
The work grows from many of the same values that shape my research: attention to what is overlooked, skepticism toward systems that treat lives as interchangeable, and a belief in care, community, and creating alternatives when existing structures are inadequate.