Keelan Evanini, PhD

Keelan Evanini has been a researcher in the field of natural language processing (NLP) for educational and conversational applications for more than 15 years. Prior to joining NBME, he served as senior vice president of engineering and AI at Kasisto, a New York-based startup company that provides conversational AI solutions to financial institutions. From 2009-2020, he worked at Educational Testing Service as a research scientist and research director, where his responsibilities included conducting foundational research into innovative approaches to automated speech scoring, strategic leadership of the research agenda focusing on educational applications of spoken language processing, and management of the research engineering team responsible for the operational implementation of automated scoring capabilities. Keelan received his doctorate in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009 and is a Senior Member of the IEEE. He has published over 90 peer-reviewed papers and has been awarded 11 US patents