I’m in the final year of my PhD in Computer Science & Engineering at The Ohio State University. I feel very fortunate to be advised by Prof. Yu Su and form part of the wonderful OSU NLP lab.

Currently looking for Fall 2025 opportunities!

Research Interests

My research interests lie in the intersection between biology and AI. On the one hand, I am passionate about how AI systems can accelerate biomedical research and directly improve people’s lives. On the other hand, neurobiology is extremely inspiring to me and I strongly believe that human brain insights will help us overcome some of the current limitations in AI systems such as failures in reasoning, knowledge retrieval and continual learning.

AI → Biology

This side of my research focuses on understanding how to best leverage language models for a wide variety of important biomedical NLP tasks such as document classification, information extraction and knowledge base construction.

Biology → AI

My research in this area focuses on leveraging insights from brain mechanisms to can inspire useful and novel ways of addressing current AI limitations. Our most recent work, HippoRAG, is a wonderful example which leverages a well-established theory of human long-term memory to inspire a simple, efficient and powerful retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework.

News

5/2024: We released “HippoRAG: Neurobiologically Inspired Long-Term Memory for Large Language Models”, a novel RAG framework inspired by human long-term memory that enables LLMs to continuously integrate knowledge across external documents.

10/2023: Our paper examining the importance of problem formulation for real-world problems through the task of UMLS Vocabulary Insertion was accepted to EMNLP 2023 (Findings).

6/2023: Our paper exploring whether the sub-optimal segmentation performance of standard biomedical tokenizers has an effect on downstream LM performance was accepted to the BioNLP Workshop @ ACL 2023.

5/2023: Our paper unlocking the hidden relation extraction abilities of LLMs by aligning RE with question answering was accepted to ACL 2023 (Findings).

10/2022: Our paper discussing potential limitations of GPT-3 in-context learning for biomedical IE was accepted to EMNLP 2022 (Findings).

5/2022: Joined Dr. Bodenreider’s lab at the National Library of Medicine for a summer internship.

3/2021: Won an Accelerator Grant from the Translational Data Analytics Institute for Social Media Pharmacovigilance.

10/2020: Our paper introducing a text classification dataset regarding COVID-19 documents was accepted to EMNLP 2020 (Findings).

4/2020: Our paper conducting a comprehensive study on the Clinical Reading Comprehension task based on the emrQA dataset was accepted to ACL 2020.

Short Bio

I grew up in San José, Costa Rica and moved to the US in 2011 to obtain my BA in Applied Mathematics from UC Berkeley. I first encountered the wonders of backprop while doing theoretical neuroscience research at the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience. After graduation I decided to pursue my passion for practical problems and joined Dr. Karim Galil and Dr. Wael Salloum at Mendel AI, a biomedical NLP startup working to make clinical trial recruitment for precision medicine more efficient. At Mendel, I not only developed my technical and AI research skills but also saw first hand what it takes to build a successful company from the ground up.

I left Mendel three years later and started my PhD life at the OSU NLP lab. Most recently, in the summer of 2022, I completed a research internship in Dr. Olivier Bodenreider’s lab at the National Library of Medicine working on improving the construction process of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS).

For more information, please check out my CV (September 2024).

Hobbies & Fun Times

In my free time, I like to stay active by dancing, playing soccer, climbing and hiking (preferably to and from tall mountains). I also love meeting interesting new people and learning about their lives and research (conferences are my happy place).

Please send me an email or message me on Twitter if you wanna chat. Always down to meet new people!