Meet the team
Our researchers explore hard AI questions sitting close to Thoughtworks experts who know how to turn useful findings into methods, tools and frameworks others can apply. This is not research kept at a polite distance from the rest of the company. It is research surrounded by builders.
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Runyan Tan
Machine learning engineer, Principal Consultant
Runyan is an AI researcher at Thoughtworks and faculty at the National University of Singapore. He is interested in applying theoretically grounded approaches to AI to increase its reliability and explainability. His research explores uncertainty methods and active learning in AI. Besides AI, he’s a fan of coffee, brisk walking and wholesome, hearty meals.
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Parag Mahajani
Principal AI/ML Content Specialist
Parag Mahajani is a Content Specialist and Creator on AI research especially on LLMs. He has written more than a dozen Insight blogs for Thoughtworks. He believes and is passionate about communicating technology and science to larger and varied audiences like AIML practitioners, tech executives, sales force and other. He joined Thoughtworks in Feb 2022 at Pune, India.
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Manikandan Ravikiran
AI Researcher
Manikandan Ravikiran is an AI Researcher at Thoughtworks focusing on advancing Large Language Model (LLM) adoption through evaluation frameworks for completeness, explanation fairness and decoding optimization. In addition to his work in natural language processing, he has contributed to research in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), with emphasis on reasoning systems, project delivery and scalable AI pipelines. With several research papers and patents, Manikandan brings deep expertise in building end-to-end AI systems that combine large-scale data analysis, rigorous mathematical modeling and real-world deployment at scale. His work bridges research and practice, with collaborations spanning DFKI Germany, NII Japan, IIT Kanpur, IIT Mandi and IIT Bombay. Manikandan also plays a key role in the BharatGen Project, pioneering AI solutions for Indic languages. He has been recognized globally, including the Outstanding Reviewer Award at ACL 2023. He contributes actively to the research community, serving for premier conferences and journals including ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, COLING, Language Resources and Evaluation (Springer) and TALLIP (ACM).
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Karrtik Iyer
Principal Consultant, AI Researcher
Karrtik Iyer is an AI researcher and Head of the Data Science & AI Community at Thoughtworks India. He brings over 25 years of industry experience, with nearly a decade at Thoughtworks. His expertise encompasses Large Language Models (LLMs), Generative AI, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Knowledge Graphs, and Bayesian Learning. As part of the Thoughtworks AI Labs, he is actively engaged in research on the interpretability of LLMs, addressing challenges such as the AI trust paradox and model transparency.
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Shayan Mohanty
Chief Data and AI Officer
Shayan mohanty is the Chief Data and AI Officer at Thoughtworks, where he shapes the vision, capabilities, and commercial direction of the global Data and AI practice. He previously led Thoughtworks' AI research lab, focused on AI interpretability, robustness, and control. Shayan joined Thoughtworks through the acquisition of Watchful, an AI startup he co-founded and led as CEO, which built tools to automate data labeling and accelerate model development. Earlier in his career, he led the stream processing team at Facebook responsible for 100% of ads metrics data infrastructure, and has been a guest scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
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Shuang Wu
AI researcher
Shuang Wu is an AI researcher at Thoughtworks, where his research explores optimal transport for multimodal generative models and domain adaptation, alongside developing visually and conceptually grounded approaches to improve model robustness and interpretability. Previously, Shuang contributed to autonomous driving perception at Black Sesame Technologies and human motion modeling at ByteDance. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Nanyang Technological University, with earlier training in physics at the École Polytechnique and National University of Singapore.
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Phillip Howard
AI Researcher
Phillip Howard is an AI Researcher, team lead, and manger at Thoughtworks whose work spans a broad range of topics including responsible AI, synthetic data generation, model interpretability, and sampling techniques. Much of his recent research focuses on fairness and bias in vision-language models, particularly through the lens of counterfactual examples. Prior to joining Thoughtworks, Phillip worked at Intel for 10 years where he led a team focused on multimodal cognitive AI.
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Allen Roush
AI researcher
Allen Roush is an AI researcher at ThoughtWorks. His research explores argument mining, competitive debate, creativity, LLMs, and safety, alignment, and AI agents and similar problems. In his free time he enjoys swimming and going out and exploring the world with his dog and his partner.
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Xin Su
AI Researcher
Xin Su is an AI Researcher at Thoughtworks, where he works on advancing multimodal AI, autonomous agents, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. His research focuses on synthetic data generation and training methodologies for multimodal large language models, designing agentic frameworks for complex environments, and developing knowledge graph systems with novel retrieval-reasoning pipelines. His work also spans structured information extraction and temporal reasoning. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona.
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Fangyuan Yu
AI researcher
Fangyuan Yu is an AI researcher at Thoughtworks working on reinforcement learning, inner monologue, and information bottleneck methods to improve large language models. He previously worked on LLM applications and autonomous driving perception systems, and holds a Ph.D. in statistics from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.
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John Singleton
Global head of Operations, Data and AI
John Singleton is a Principal Program Manager at Thoughtworks. He joined the company following its acquisition of Watchful, where he was the co-founder and Head of Success.