Brendan Quinn is a Lead AI Engineer with 13 years at Northwestern University, where he drives generative AI and ML strategy to modernize digital collections and library systems. He blends hands-on software craftsmanship in Python, Elixir/Phoenix, and Ruby/Rails with cloud-native architectures on AWS and Azure to deliver scalable, vectorized search and LLM-powered discovery workflows. A former digital initiatives librarian with an MLIS, he uniquely pairs domain knowledge of archives and repositories with production ML integration—improving resource discoverability rather than just building models. Brendan is active in the Samvera open-source community and advises on institutional generative AI policy as a member of Northwestern’s AI Advisory Committee. Regularly speaking at industry conferences, he focuses on practical, reproducible AI methods for academic libraries and novel approaches to embedding AI into legacy repository systems.
13 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
MLIS, Library and Information Science, MLIS, Library and Information Science at Dominican University
BA, History, BA, History at University of Colorado Boulder
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Brendan Quinn - Lead AI Engineer at Northwestern University