Summary
Nan Duan is a research-led technology executive with nine years of professional experience and a Ph.D. in Natural Language Processing from Tianjin University, currently serving as Vice President of JD.com and Deputy Director of JD Explore Academy. He leads foundational-model research across language, audio, vision and embodied AI, having previously built large-scale multimodal models as head of JD’s Vision and Multimodal Lab. A long-time NLP researcher with a decade-plus history at Microsoft, his work spans question answering, semantic parsing, code intelligence and multimodal reasoning, bridging core research and production at scale. He also mentors the next generation as an adjunct Ph.D. supervisor at multiple top Chinese universities and has engaged in AGI-focused work as a technical fellow. Known for combining deep academic rigor with product-minded leadership, he operates at the intersection of foundational models and real-world AI deployment.
9 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Ph.D. Natural Language Processing, Ph.D. Natural Language Processing at Tianjin University