Summary
Aliakbar Nafar is an AI researcher and engineer with a PhD focus in NLP and LLMs, bringing eight years of hands-on experience building production LLMs and neuro-symbolic systems. He led a 12+ person cross-institution open-source project and earned NAACL 2025 Outstanding Paper recognition, reflecting both research impact and collaborative leadership. His expertise spans fine-tuning and training large models, in-context learning, and reasoning, with practical deployments across industry teams at BetterHelp, Dow, and startups. Known for translating domain knowledge into usable ML products, he has also mentored teams and managed end-to-end project delivery, blending academic rigor with production engineering. Based in East Lansing, he combines deep technical scholarship with a track record of shipping systems that bridge research and real-world users.
8 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Ph.D. Computer Science, Ph.D. Computer Science at Michigan State University
B.Sc. Software Engineering, B.Sc. Software Engineering at Sharif University of Technology