Aliakbar Nafar
AI Extern at BetterHelp
East Lansing, Michigan, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolAliakbar 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 UniversityB.Sc. Software Engineering, B.Sc. Software Engineering at Sharif University of Technology
Github Skills (3)
machine-learning4
large-language-models2
git2
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
HLR/BLInD
Feb 2024 - Apr 2025
Contributions:56 pushes, 1 branch in 1 year 2 months
HLR/Probabilistic_Logical_Reasoning
May 2023 - Jan 2025
Contributions:18 pushes, 3 branches in 1 year 7 months
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