Reza Jafar

Reza is a seasoned Data Scientist with over 10 years of experience in health technology. He specializes in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, deep learning, and specifically in natural language processing (NLP) and natural language understanding (NLU). 

Currently, as a Principal Data Scientist at Cytel, Reza leads AI projects that leverage machine learning and NLP to drive innovations in health. One of his notable achievements includes developing an automated, patent-pending systematic literature review software using cutting-edge NLP models. This tool features an advanced NLP screener, an AI model to extract key elements from citations, and a de-duplicator feature. 

Prior to his role at Cytel, Reza served as a Senior Data Scientist at MTEK Sciences, a HealthTech startup, where he developed NLP tools to automate the curation of medical literature and created models to extract and normalize bio-entities from biomedical and clinical texts. His career also includes roles as a data scientist consultant at Genentech and as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ottawa Heart Institute. Reza earned his PhD in Engineering from the University of Toronto in 2013.