Dr. Karine Megerdoomian

Zoorna Institute (USA)

Karine is the Founder & Director of Zoorna Institute for Language, AI, and Society, with over two decades of expertise in Persian and Iranian language NLP and multilingual language technology, across academia, industry, and nonprofit research. She previously worked at MITRE as a Principal AI Engineer, leading applied research in decision-support systems. Karine earned her Ph.D. from the University of Southern California and was the computational linguist for Shiraz, the first Persian–English machine translation system at New Mexico State University. She is also recognized for her linguistic research on complex predicates and the syntax-semantics interface.

Rayyan Merchant

Zoorna Institute (USA)

Rayyan is a computational linguist and intern at the Zoorna Institute for Language, AI, and Society. He graduated from the University of Florida in 2023 with bachelor's degrees in Linguistics and Computer Science, where he wrote his thesis on machine transliteration between two Persian written standards: Tajik-Cyrillic and Perso-Arabic. His research focuses on NLP for social good with a focus on low-resource and marginalized language varieties.

Dr. Ehsaneddin Asgari

QCRI (Qatar)

Ehsan is a scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), specializing in multilingual and multimodal language processing with a focus on West Asian languages. He received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and his master’s degree from EPFL, and has held research positions at MIT, LMU Munich, Volkswagen Group Data:Lab, and the Helmholtz Research Center. His contributions to Iranian languages include large-scale evaluation of Persian LLMs. information extraction for Persian, topic modeling of Persian poetry, and the development of resources for Kurdish, Luri, Tajiki, Azeri, and Pahlavi.