Dr. Natalie Parde joins UIC as Assistant Professor and Co-Director of NLP Lab

Natalie Parde received her Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of North Texas in 2018, where she was also a member of the Human Intelligence and Language Technologies Laboratory working under Dr. Rodney D. Nielsen. Her primary research interests are in dialogue systems and their applications, computational processing of figurative language and other forms of linguistic creativity, and grounded language learning.

Natalie is the recipient of numerous awards and scholarships, including a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the Google Grace Hopper Scholarship, and the UNT Department of Computer Science and Engineering's Outstanding Ph.D. Student Award. She has presented her scholarly work across the United States and internationally, at venues including the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, and the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. In addition to her research interests, Natalie enjoys CS outreach.  She served as President of UNT's Women in Computing organization, and has been involved in organizing K-12 opportunities with the National Center for Women & Information Technology, the Design Your World STEM Conference for Girls, and the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad.