Biography
Short Bio (150 words)
Dr. Christan Grant is the Arnold and Lisa Goldberg Rising Star Associate Professor in the Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering at the University of Florida, where he directs the UF Data Studio. His lab builds AI theory and systems for data that current models cannot process. The group pursues fairness-aware learning under shifting distributions, NLP for encoded visual writing systems and for low-resource or atypical speech, and interactive systems where humans and AI reason together. This work appears at KDD, ICDE, ACL, and EMNLP. Dr. Grant earned a Best Paper Award at the 2025 IEEE ASRU workshop for studying audio language models and child stuttering speech, and his team won the 2026 AmericasNLP shared task on cultural image captioning for Indigenous languages. ICDE 2026 named him a Distinguished Program Committee member. His research draws support from the NSF, Amazon, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, among others.
Long Bio
Dr. Christan Grant is the Arnold and Lisa Goldberg Rising Star Associate Professor in the Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering at the University of Florida. He directs the UF Data Studio, a research group that builds AI theory and systems for data that current models cannot process. The lab works across three connected directions. The first develops fairness-aware learning that holds up when data distributions shift, so models stay equitable as conditions change. The second brings natural language processing to underserved writing systems and speech, including encoded visual scripts such as Mixtec codices, machine translation for low-resource and Indigenous languages, and recognition of atypical speech such as child stuttering. The third designs interactive systems where people and AI reason together, from retrieval-augmented question answering to visual analytics for problems such as gerrymandering. Work from the group appears at KDD, ICDE, ACL, EMNLP, and NeurIPS workshops. Dr. Grant received a Best Paper Award at the 2025 IEEE ASRU workshop for studying audio large language models and child stuttering speech. His team won first place overall in the 2026 AmericasNLP Shared Task on Cultural Image Captioning for Indigenous Languages. ICDE 2026 named him a Distinguished Program Committee member, and he serves on the VLDB 2026 Review Board and as an Area Chair for KDD 2026. Dr. Grant was an associate professor at the University of Oklahoma before joining UF. He earned his doctorate in the University of Florida database research lab, where he held an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and an NSF LSAMP Bridge to Doctorate fellowship. His research draws support from the NSF, Colgate-Palmolive, Amazon, the FAA, the USDA, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, among others.
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- llms.txt, a structured summary of Dr. Grant for large language models and AI agents