Ehsaneddin Asgari, Ph.D.

Ehsaneddin Asgari is a scientist at QCRI (HBKU, Qatar Foundation), where he leads research on multilingual and multimodal language processing. His work explores language modeling as a universal framework for understanding the world's phenomena — from natural languages and their dialects to biological sequences and chemical compounds. Ehsan holds a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and an M.Sc. from EPFL. Before joining QCRI, he was NLP Technical Lead at the Volkswagen Group AI Innovation Center and a postdoctoral researcher at Helmholtz Center for Infection Research. His previous roles include research positions at MIT CSAIL, MIT Brain and Cognitive Sciences, the NLP group at LMU Munich, ABB Research, and ADSC (UIUC Singapore).

2019
Ph.D. in Applied Science and Technology

University of California, Berkeley, USA
- Designated Emphasis in Computational Data Science and Engineering
- Thesis: Life Language Processing — Deep Learning-based Language-agnostic Processing of Proteomics, Genomics/Metagenomics, and Human Languages
2016

M.Sc. in Applied Science and Technology

University of California, Berkeley, USA
2014

M.Sc. in Computer Science

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland
2013–2014
Visiting Student, CSAIL

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA
- Thesis: Automatic Story Merging using Topic Modeling — A Case Study on the Story of Moses
2011

B.Sc. in Software Engineering

Sharif University of Technology, Iran

2024–Present

Scientist

Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), Qatar
2023

NLP Technical Lead

Volkswagen Group AI Innovation Center, Germany
2019–2022

NLP Data Scientist

Volkswagen Group Data:Lab, Germany
2019–2023

Postdoctoral Researcher

Helmholtz Center for Infection Research, Germany
2017–2019

Research Fellow

Helmholtz Center for Infection Research, Germany
2017–2018

Research Fellow

Center for Information and Language Processing (CIS), LMU Munich, Germany
2012

Intern — Data Mining

ABB Corporate Research, Zurich, Switzerland
2010

Intern — Machine Learning Researcher

Advanced Digital Sciences Center of UIUC, Singapore

2026
- Best Resource Paper Award — EACL 2026
2024
- Ranked 1st in Semantic Evaluation (SemEval) Shared-Task, Multilingual Detection of Persuasion Techniques
2023
- 72nd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting Alumni (Nominated by Helmholtz Research Center)
2020
- ISCB Fellowship at ISMB
- Ranked 2nd in Semantic Evaluation (SemEval) Shared-Task 1
2019
- Ranked 1st and 2nd in two out of three tasks in CAFA 3.14 (Protein Function Annotation)
2018
- Google Scholarship for Machine Learning Summer School (LxMLS), Lisbon
2016
- Best Paper Award at Multilingual and Cross-lingual Methods in NLP, NAACL-HLT Workshop (sponsored by Google)
- Selected Submission at ICML Computational Biology Workshop
- Google Travel Grant for ICML 2016
2014–2016
- Graduate Division Fellowship, UC Berkeley
2007
- Gold Medal in the Iranian National Olympiad of Literature and Linguistics

Senior Area Chair
- ACL 2025, 2026
Area Chair
- NeurIPS 2026
- COLM 2026
- ACL (2021–2025)
- EMNLP (2023–2025)
- NAACL (2023–2025)
- EACL (2024–2025)
- Efficient Natural Language & Speech Processing at NeurIPS 2024
Reviewer
- ICLR 2026
- ACL / EMNLP / NAACL (2017–2023)
- Nature Communications, Bioinformatics, PLOS Computational Biology, IEEE/ACM TCBB
Organizer
- SilkRoadNLP — Workshop on NLP for the Iranian Language Family, EACL 2026
- QCRI–DeepMind MENA ML Winter School (since 2024)
- Muslims in ML (since 2024)
Mentor
- Arabic NLP School — co-located with EACL 2026
Editorial
- Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (NLP Section), since 2023