Bashar Alhafni

Hi! I am an Assistant Professor of Natural Language Processing at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), where I lead the Arabic AI Modeling (Aram) Lab. My research focuses on Arabic NLP with an emphasis on three interconnected themes: advancing educational Arabic NLP, developing personalized and human-centered language technologies, and understanding how linguistic representation shapes model behavior. At its core, my work aims to build Arabic NLP systems that enhance learning experiences and contribute to social good.

Before joining MBZUAI, I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science from New York University (NYU). My dissertation focused on controlled Arabic natural language generation with applications in AI for education and social impact. Before that, I earned my Master’s from the University of Southern California (USC), where I worked at ISI on low-resource machine translation and event relation extraction. I hold a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Bridgeport.
In addition to my academic work, I have held applied NLP research roles at Grammarly and Dataminr, where I contributed to projects in personalized text generation, summarization, and multilingual NLP.

I am always looking to work with motivated students and postdocs. Feel free to reach out if you are interested in applying to MBZUAI.