Nihal Nayak

Nihal Nayak is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University since June 2025, focusing on data-centric machine learning under the guidance of David Alvarez-Melis. Prior experience includes serving as a Graduate Research Assistant at Brown University from August 2019 to May 2025, where significant contributions involved developing Bonito, an open-source LLM for creating synthetic instruction-tuning datasets. Nihal Nayak also interned as an ML Research Intern at ASAPP, where a few-sample clustering evaluation framework named CEREAL was introduced, achieving notable improvements in evaluation metric estimation. Previous roles include NLP Engineer at Stride.ai Inc, developing a bi-LSTM-based multilingual low-resource entity extraction system, and Project Assistant at the Indian Institute of Science, contributing to deep learning video analytics and developing a vocabulary flashcard application. Nihal Nayak holds a PhD and MS in Computer Science from Brown University and a Bachelor of Engineering in Information Technology from Ramaiah Institute of Technology.