People

PhD Candidates

Dimitrios Alivanistos (link)

Scientific Hypotheses Generation .
Status: PhD thesis “Knowledge Graphs & Transformers for Hypothesis Generation” submitted and approved, defense planned 6 October 2025

Vaishali Pal (link)

Task-Based Question Answering .
Status: PhD thesis “Information Seeking over Semi-Structured Tabular Data.”submitted, defense planned 3 September 2025.

Corey Harper (guest)

Elsevier LABS member and PhD candidate knowledge graph construction from measurement information and tabular data in scientific literature (link). Note, Corey Harper is a guest of the lab, his work is related to the work in the lab, but he is not funded by the lab.

Postdocs

Romana Pernisch

Knowledge‐driven query construction (link)

Na Li

Research asset search, data quality control and active learning.(link)

Elsevier Researchers

Payal Mitra

NLP Specialist, Data Scientist at Elsevier (link).

Katie Scranton

Data Science Lead at Elsevier Health (link).

Josh Fisher

Research Reporting Quality at Elsevier (link).

Lab Managers

Michael Cochez

Lab Manager and Assistant Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (link).

Thom Pijnenburg

Industry Lab Manager, Machine Learning Specialist at Elsevier (link).

Lab Directors

Rinke Hoekstra

Industry Director and Lead Architect - Knowledge, Elsevier (link).

Paul Groth

Academic Director, and Professor of Algorithmic Data Science at the University of Amsterdam (link).

Frank van Harmelen

Academic Director, and Professor in Knowledge Representation & Reasoning at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (link).

Researchers

Maarten de Rijke

University professor of AI and Information Retrieval at the University of Amsterdam; VP Personalization and Relevance at Ahold Delhaize (link).

Herke van Hoof

Assistant Professor Reinforcement Learning at University of Amsterdam (link).

Georgios Tsatsaronis

Vice President Data Science Research Content Operations , Elsevier (link).

Anita De Waard

Vice President Research Collaborations, Elsevier (link).

Former lab affiliates

Xu Wang (guest)

Dataset recommendation (link).

Xu was working at the VU and is now at the University of Maastricht

Maulik Kamdar

Senior Data Scientist and Software Engineer at Elsevier Health (link).

Maulik was workign at Elsevier Health and is now a Principal Data Scientist at Kaiser Permanente.

Ali Vardasbi (guest)

PhD student at the , , working on different aspects of search and recommendation unbiased learning to rank from user interactions. Particularly, we are working on bias and fairness for search and recommendation. Note, Ali Vardasbi is a guest of the lab, his work is related to the work in the lab, but he is not funded by the lab.
Status: Finshed PhD thesis December 2023. Now at Spotify. (link).

Daniel Daza (link)

Knowledge Graph Construction through link prediction and text understanding.
Status: submitted PhD thesis “Exploiting Subgraphs and Attributes for Representation Learning on Knowledge Graphs”, defense 16 December 2024, the candidate received a “cum laude” distinction for his dissertation. Now postdoc at Amsterdam AMC.

Masoud Mansoury

Reinforcement learning over structured multi-modal information & Bias in Recommendation (link).
Masoud was a postdoc in the lab. Now he is an assistant professor in the Multimedia Computing Group (MMC) at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft).

Philip Tillman

Former Industry Lab Manager of discovery lab. Senior Machine Learning Scientist, Research Content Operations, Elsevier (link).