Shekhar Pradhan is a Lecturer in the Data Science Institute at Brown University where he heads the Conversational AI Lab and is the Director of Industry and Research Engagements. His current research conducted in the Conversational AI Lab is focused on creating semantically rich embeddings which are used to create relatively smarter LLMs. He has a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Maryland, College Park and another in philosophy from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Before joining Brown University, he was a faculty member of Columbia University. In addition to his academic activities, Shekhar Pradhan is an entrepreneur. He is the CEO of Docunexus, an American company specialized in creating AI-powered research assistants for extracting insights from document sets.