PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Golnoosh Farnadi

Golnoosh Farnadi is an AI researcher whose work spans social-media user modeling, algorithmic fairness and privacy-preserving machine learning. Born in Iran, she earned a computer-science master's at Delft and a joint PhD in Belgium, then pursued postdoctoral research in California and Montréal. At HEC Montréal and Mila, she received a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and the Google AI Research Scholar Award, and coauthored PrivFair and privacy-preserving fair-ranking research. She led a music-recommender project, founded the EQUAL lab, co-directed McGill's Collaborative for AI and Society, and had her Canada CIFAR AI Chair renewed in 2025. As of October 2026, she is an assistant professor at McGill, an adjunct professor at Université de Montréal and a core academic member of Mila.

Badges

Timeline

  1. 2011–2017

    A PhD in social media modeling

    Born in Iran, Farnadi earns an MSc in computer science from Delft University of Technology in 2011. She completes a joint computer-science PhD at Ghent University and KU Leuven in 2017 under Martine De Cock and Marie-Francine Moens; her thesis models social-media users and predicts personality traits from digital traces.

  2. 2017–2020

    Postdoctoral research in three institutions

    At UC Santa Cruz, she works as a postdoctoral researcher in Lise Getoor's Statistical Relational Learning Group (LINQS) from 2017 to 2018. From 2018 to 2019, she is an IVADO postdoctoral fellow at Polytechnique Montréal under Michel Gendreau. From 2019 to 2020, she is an IVADO postdoctoral fellow at Université de Montréal/Mila under Simon Lacoste-Julien, co-supervised by Michel Gendreau, studying fairness-aware sequential decision making.

  3. November 2020–April 2021

    A CIFAR chair and Google award

    She joins HEC Montréal's Department of Decision Sciences in November 2020 as an assistant professor and receives a Canada CIFAR AI Chair in January 2021. In April 2021, she receives a Google AI Research Scholar Award for her project on algorithmic fairness in decision-focused deep learning.

  4. 2022

    Fair audits with PrivFair

    In 2022, she coauthors PrivFair, a library that uses secure multiparty computation to audit model fairness while protecting sensitive audit data and model parameters.

  5. 2023

    Privacy-preserving fair item ranking

    In 2023, she coauthors a method for ranking items that combines differential privacy and secure multi-party computation to address both producer fairness and user privacy.

  6. 2024–2025

    A music recommendation project

    As lead researcher, she directs an interdisciplinary 2024–2025 project on music recommender systems to improve discoverability for under-represented music cultures, with Fenwick McKelvey as co-researcher.

  7. 2025

    The EQUAL lab and McCAIS

    She is the founder and principal investigator of the EQUAL lab, which focuses on algorithmic fairness and responsible AI, and co-directs McGill's Collaborative for AI and Society (McCAIS). CIFAR renews her Canada CIFAR AI Chair in December 2025.

  8. As of October 2026

    TEA and current faculty roles

    In August 2026, she coauthors the preprint TEA: Text Encoder Alignment for Robust Concept Erasure in Text-to-Image Models, which fine-tunes the text encoder while keeping the generative backbone frozen. McGill appoints Elsa Vasseur as McCAIS co-director in October 2026 after Farnadi's tenure in the role. As of October 2026, she is an assistant professor at McGill's School of Computer Science, an adjunct professor at Université de Montréal, a core academic member of Mila, a visiting faculty researcher at Google and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair holder.

Career

  1. Since 2019Université de MontréalIVADO postdoctoral fellow
  2. Since 2019MilaIVADO postdoctoral fellow
  3. NowMcGill UniversityAssistant professor
  4. NowGoogleVisiting faculty researcher
  5. From 2025EQUAL labFounder and principal investigator
  6. From 2020HEC MontréalAssistant professor
  7. 2018–2019Polytechnique MontréalIVADO postdoctoral fellow
  8. 2017–2018University of California, Santa CruzPostdoctoral researcher

Education

  1. 2017Ghent UniversityPhD
  2. 2017KU LeuvenPhD
  3. 2011Delft University of TechnologyMSc

From the biography.

  1. 11% of AI doctorate holders from 2010 to 2016 founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after graduationIncludes Golnoosh Farnadi. We estimate how often AI doctorate holders founded or led a company or lab by 10 years after graduation, how waiting times compare between founders and top jobs, and which universities trained the most.
  2. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Includes Google. Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI each year from 1955 to 2025, tracing the shift from university labs to companies.
  3. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Google. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.
  4. 20% of people at companies who shape AI also hold a university role, led by Google and Stanford UniversityIncludes Google. We estimate that 539 of the 6,766 people with a known current organization (8%) hold both a university role and a company role, including 20% of people at companies and 13% of people at universities.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Golnoosh Farnadi yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Computational Web Intelligence cwi.ugent.be. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Golnoosh Farnadi | Assistant Professor at McGill University, Adjunct Professor at University of Montréal, Core Academic Member at MILA, Canada CIFAR AI (CCAI) Chair holder gfarnadi.github.io. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Making AI fairer: How Golnoosh Farnadi tackles biases mila.quebec. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Golnoosh Farnadi | Assistant Professor at McGill University, Adjunct Professor at University of Montréal, Core Academic Member at MILA, Canada CIFAR AI (CCAI) Chair holder gfarnadi.github.io. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Golnoosh FARNADI - La recherche - Université de Montréal recherche.umontreal.ca. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. A Canada CIFAR Chair in Artificial Intelligence is granted to Golnoosh Farnadi hec.ca. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Golnoosh Farnadi receives Google AI 2021 Research Scholar Award mila.quebec. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. PrivFair: a Library for Privacy-Preserving Fairness Auditing arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. Privacy-Preserving Fair Item Ranking arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  10. An ecosystem for AI collaboration mcgillnews.mcgill.ca. Checked 21 October 2026.
  11. Professor Matt Kusner Appointed Canada CIFAR AI Chair mila.quebec. Checked 21 October 2026.
  12. Elsa Vasseur appointed McCAIS Co-Director mcgill.ca. Checked 21 October 2026.
  13. Golnoosh Farnadi mila.quebec. Checked 21 October 2026.