Nazli Goharian

Nazli Goharian is a Clinical Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University and Associate Director of the Information Retrieval Lab. She holds a PhD from Florida Institute of Technology and joined Georgetown in 2010 after industry experience and previous academic positions at Illinois Institute of Technology.

Education:

• PhD Computer Science, Florida Institute of Technology (2001)
• MSc Computer Science, George Mason University (1995)
• BSc Computer Science, Dortmund University (1992)

Her research spans information retrieval, text mining, and natural language processing with applications in health/medical domains. She focuses on developing computational methods for medical search, mental health analysis from social media, clinical text summarization, and adverse drug reaction detection.

Her recent publications (2020-2016) predominantly focus on neural ranking models, transformer architectures for document retrieval, and clinical NLP applications. Notable trends include work on BERT-based re-ranking, zero-shot multilingual retrieval, and ontology-aware medical summarization.

Awards & Honors:

• EMNLP 2017 Best Long Paper Award
• COLING 2018 Honorable Mention & Area Chair Favorite
• Julia Beveridge Award for Faculty (IIT, 2009)
• Multiple Teaching Excellence Awards (2002-2007)

Research Leadership: She has supervised 6 PhD students to completion with placements at leading institutions. Secured over $500,000 in research funding from NSF, Adobe, and international partners. Founded the Semi-Annual Graduate Research Presentation Days at Georgetown and served as Program Chair for ECIR 2024.

She leads the Information Retrieval Lab which focuses on developing novel algorithms for efficient document retrieval, cross-lingual search, and specialized applications in healthcare text analysis.