Our Team

Professor Solorio’s research interests include all things multilingual, low‑resource NLP, information extraction and, more recently, multimodal problems. She leads the RiTUAL group at MBZUAI and mentors students across multiple research programmes.

Injy Hamed received her PhD from Stuttgart University and worked as a Research Assistant at CAMeL Lab in New York University Abu Dhabi before joining MBZUAI. Her research focuses on code‑switched and Arabic natural language processing.

Atnafu received his PhD in Computer Science from Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico. His research interests include NLP for low‑resourced languages, multilingual language models, speech and multimodal NLP, and NLP for African languages.

Aseem is a postdoctoral researcher working jointly with Prof. Thamar Solorio and Prof. Monojit Choudhury. He received his PhD from IIIT Delhi. His research focuses on how people interact in digital environments and using large language models to address social challenges related to digital health and cultural dynamics.

Emilio Villa‑Cueva is a PhD student at MBZUAI. He holds a master’s degree in Computer Science from the Mathematics Research Center (CIMAT) and works on building systems capable of understanding human communication across different languages and cultures. His research interests include few‑shot learning, domain adaptation and cross‑lingual transfer.

Fadel Thior is a PhD student in NLP at MBZUAI. His research interests are on code‑switched text and ASR, with an emphasis on data‑efficient training, and robust evaluation. He aims to build inclusive speech technologies that work reliably for underrepresented communities.

Kareem Elzeky is passionate about natural language processing, multimodal AI, and aligning large language models with human intent. His interests include cross-lingual understanding, multimodal AI, and exploring how models can learn from both text and human feedback.

Mena Attia is a second-year Master’s student in Natural Language Processing at MBZUAI. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Cornell University. Her research interests include Arabic NLP and cultural alignment in large language models.

Sholpan Bolatzhanova is a 2nd year MSc student at MBZUAI. Her research interests are Multimodal LLMs and Theory of Mind.

Diana Turmakhan is a 2nd year MSc student at MBZUAI. Her research interests include vision-language models, multimodal reasoning, low-resource NLP, and culturally-aware AI.