Ayah Zirikly

Dr. Zirikly is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the George Washington University (GW) and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Center for Language and Speech Processing at Johns Hopkins University (JHU). Dr. Zirikly’s research is dedicated to advancing applied Natural Language Processing (NLP) within health informatics, with a primary focus on mental health, clinical narratives, and social media analysis. Her lab aims to build patient-centered AI models that are not only highly accurate but also explainable and fair. A core component of her work involves addressing algorithmic bias to ensure AI tools perform similarly across different groups, rather than functioning as "black-box" systems. She is a co-creator of the UMD Reddit Suicidality Dataset, a vital benchmark for mental health analysis. 

 

Prior to joining the faculty at GW, Dr. Zirikly was a Research Scientist at the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare at JHU and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). During her time at the NIH, she developed health informatics solutions aimed at improving the disability eligibility process for the Social Security Administration by extracting critical mobility and mental health status data from unstructured medical records. She earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the George Washington University.