Nandan Thakur

Nandan Thakur

nandan.thakur@uwaterloo.ca

:gift: Mentorship

I’ve been blessed with the oppertunity to mentor few passionate undergraduate, masters and informally helped out early PhD students with projects during my time at University of Waterloo. Here’s a brief list of students:

1-on-1 mentorship

Winter 2025

  • Worked with Crystina Zhang (co-mentor) to mentor Forrest Gao (ECE Masters, UWaterloo) on reproducing scores on MIRACL for multilingual retrieval models such as KALM, DRAMA and extending SWIM-X, a synthetic LLM-generated multilingual retrieval training dataset. I designed the scope of the project, provided relevant background, fixed day-to-day bugs faced in Compute Canada, provided starter code base, and conducted code reviews

  • Mentored Jonathan Zhao (CS Undergraduate, UWaterloo) on constructing complex queries for training retrieval models. The idea was to use an LLM recursively to continue to edit and rephrase the question in multiple stages. Similar to Forrest, I designed the scope of the project, provided relevant background, fixed day-to-day bugs faced in Compute Canada, provided starter code base, and conducted code reviews.

A brief history about my journey:

I transitioned into an academic lifestyle to pursue my curiosity in conducting research in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR). My career path has evolved across several domains — from electronics → data analytics → data science → NLP & IR.

I strongly believe in open-source research as a means to enhance education and help others (and myself) develop the ability to critically ask the most impactful questions in research. I owe immense gratitude to my academic mentors and peers (everyone at UKP Lab & UWaterloo), whose early guidance was instrumental in helping me navigate this interdisciplinary shift.

Continuing this tradition of mentorship and community engagement, I’m eager to give back by mentoring a few early-stage undergraduate or master’s students at the University of Waterloo who are interested in my research directions consisting of data, evaluations in information retrieval & RAG. Personally, I encourage students with diverse backgrounds or in a similar nutshell as mine to reach out.

If you’re interested, please send me an introductory email about yourself, including your academic background, and attach your CV. You can reach me at nandan.thakur@uwaterloo.ca