People 2025
Meet Oxford LLMs 2025 Team!
Here, you will find information about workshop organisers and lecturers who are leading this year’s sessions. Beyond the core sessions, we are also inviting researchers and research teams to come and share with you their current research ideas and projects at the intersection of NLP and social sciences. Stay tuned, as we will be updating this page with additional speakers as we receive their confirmations!
Organisers
Rachel Bernhard (Co-Organiser)
DPIR, Nuffield College, Oxford University
Rachel Bernhard is Associate Professor of Quantitative Political Science Research Methods at Nuffield College and the University of Oxford. Before joining Nuffield, she served as an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Davis. She holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, and previously was a Postdoctoral Prize Fellow in Politics at Nuffield.
Her current research focuses on appearance-based discrimination in politics. She has recently taught courses on political psychology and public policy, identity politics, statistics and research design, women in politics, and computational methods. To learn more about Rachel’s research and teaching, visit her website.
Ilya Boytsov (Lecturer, Co-Organiser)
NLP Lead, Wayfair
Ilya is an applied Deep Learning Scientist with a focus on Natural Language Processing (NLP). He currently works as the NLP lead at Wayfair in Berlin. His main professional interests include information retrieval, aspect-based sentiment analysis, and generative AI. In addition to his applied research work, Ilya has extensive experience in teaching and public speaking. He designed lectures and machine-learning bootcamps for various audiences, including students, managers, and individuals without prior coding experience. Ilya was a speaker at several ML conferences in Europe, including World Data Summit and DSC Europe. He is also a co-founder of the Street Smart AI community in Berlin where AI practitioners share their knowledge of making ML&DS happen for real-life applications. You can connect with Ilya and read more about his research on his personal website.
Maksim Zubok (Co-Organiser)
DPIR Oxford University
Maksim is a doctoral candidate in Politics at Oxford University, Nuffield College. In his dissertation, Maksim explores various ways of harnessing LLMs for social science research. Those range from classic data labelling to using the models as condensed snapshots of the internet from which we can learn how people organise relationships between concepts and thus form beliefs about the world they live in. Maksim has a longstanding interest in teaching and facilitating intellectual exchange. He has helped organise several academic events, including previous sessions of Oxford LLM workshop and the Oxford Summer Institute for Computational Social Science in 2022.
Confirmed Speakers
Grigory Sapunov (Lecturer)
CTO and co-founder of Intento
Prior to Intento, Grigory worked in industry at Yandex and in academia at the Higher School of Economics in Russia. He has over 20 years of experience in software engineering, including about 15 years in data analysis, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Since 2011, he has been engaged in deep learning. Grigory is a Google Developer Expert in Machine Learning and holds a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence.
You can connect with Grigory on LinkedIn.
Tatiana Shavrina (Lecturer)
Research Scientist Manager, Meta, Llama team
Tatiana is passionate about open source and multilingualism in LLMs, under-resourced languages, and bringing them to rich resource environments. As an enthusiast of various benchmarking methods, she has contributed to BLOOM as the lead for interpretability, led the mGPT model development, and contributed to low-resource NLP methods. Her main projects include mGPT, Russian SuperGLUE, and BLOOM. To learn more about Tatiana’s research, visit her Google Scholar profile.