About
Hi, I'm Jenny (Jannat), a PhD researcher in Computer Science at VCU. I work on vision models and vision-language models, mostly around making visual and scientific information more accessible.
Most of what I do comes down to building efficient, low-compute multimodal models, with blind and low-vision users in mind from the start rather than as an afterthought. I co-authored a paper at BioASQ 2025 (CLEF) on biomedical information extraction.
My work spans machine learning, multimodal AI and accessibility, efficient model design, RAG pipelines, and full-stack application development, with a strong focus on NLP and research-driven problem solving.
Off the clock: I believe learning new skills keeps my brain active, so I'm always picking up something new, though tennis is my all-time favorite, where the ball make my body move.
Education
Ph.D., Computer Science
Jan 2026 – Present
Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA
Advisor: Dr. Tomasz Arodz
M.S., Computer Science
Aug 2024 – Dec 2025
Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA
Advisor: Dr. Bridget T. McInnes · GPA: 3.9
Master of Computer Applications
Jul 2023 – May 2024
CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bangalore, India
GPA: 3.7
B.S., Applied Physical Science
Jul 2019 – May 2022
University of Delhi, New Delhi, India
GPA: 3.6
Research Interests
Machine Learning, Multimodal AI, and Natural Language Processing
- Vision–language models and information extraction from scientific figures
- Robustness of multimodal models to noisy, real-world inputs
- Accessibility of visual data for blind and low-vision users
- Retrieval-augmented generation and biomedical text mining
Publications
NLP@VCU at BioASQ 2025: Information Extraction on the GutBrainIE Dataset
Taylor, S., Dil, C., Shah, A., Jannat, Oldham, C., Upadhyay, A., Varughese, J., Yazbeck, N., & McInnes, B. T.
BioASQ Workshop, Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF), 2025
Biomedical Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Relationship Extraction
Jannat, Dil, C., Arodz, T., & McInnes, B. T.
In submission
Relationship Extraction Using Retrieval Augmented Generation for Biomedical Datasets
Jannat
M.S. Thesis, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2025
Scholarships & Awards
cMEDA Summer Student Scholarship
Center for Microbiome Engineering & Data Analysis (cMEDA), Virginia Commonwealth University. Awarded to support a summer biomedical project in collaboration with Dr. Bridget T. McInnes.
Leadership & Volunteering
Vice President, Computer Science Club
University of Delhi
2021 – 2022
Volunteer, Enactus Society
University of Delhi
2020 – 2022
Core Member, Computer Science Club
University of Delhi
2019 – 2021
My Professional Journey
Graduate Research Assistant (Ph.D.)
Bioinformatics & Machine Learning Lab, Virginia Commonwealth University
Building and comparing vision-language models (ViT, DePlot) for chart understanding.
Grading Assistant
CMSC Advanced Algorithms, Virginia Commonwealth University
Graded assignments and exams for a graduate-level advanced algorithms course.
Teaching Assistant
ENGR 101 Introduction to Engineering, Virginia Commonwealth University
Supported first-year students with fundamentals in Arduino, circuit theory, and theremin projects.
Graduate Student Software Engineer
Engineering Career Services, Virginia Commonwealth University
Built and deployed a student-alumni mentoring interface using Google Sheets and Apps Script.
Research Assistant
NLP Lab, Virginia Commonwealth University
Developed Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines with LLMs for relationship extraction from 1,500+ biomedical abstracts.
Teaching Assistant
EGRE 246 Programming Using C, Virginia Commonwealth University
Mentored 20+ students weekly, guiding them in debugging, data structures, and algorithmic thinking.
Software Engineer Intern
Raceme Tenders LLP, Delhi, India
Migrated a legacy PHP/MySQL site to AWS in a three-person team, reducing server downtime by 20%.
Featured Projects
AI/ML, web development, and automation projects showcasing my technical skills and problem-solving approach.
GutBrainIE
Designed a robust relation extraction pipeline focused on gut-brain biome axis literature.
Crawler-Python Script
Automation for downloading thousands of the tenders files locally from the government tender website
Next.js
React.js
Node.js
Express.js
JavaScript
Tailwind CSS
HTML5
CSS3
PostgreSQL
MongoDB
Firebase
MySQL
Python
TensorFlow
PyTorch
Scikit-Learn
Hugging Face
OpenCV
NLP
Pandas
GitHub
Postman
Ollama
LlamaIndex
Open to Research Collaboration
I'm excited to contribute to research programs at the intersection of NLP, Machine Learning, biomedical data, and image-based AI, with a strong focus on building meaningful, data-driven solutions.
Feel free to reach out if you think there may be a fit. 🎾