Welcome to my webpage!

I am Varada Kolhatkar (IPA: [ʋəɾəda kɔːlɦəʈkər]). (If you are curious, Varada (वरदा) is a Sanskrit name, which means the one who grants your wishes 😇!) I grew up in a traditional household in a city called Pune in India. My first language is Marathi.

My background is in computer science and my areas of expertise are natural language processing, computational linguistics, and applied machine learning. I received my Ph.D. in computational linguistics from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto.

My heart is in teaching and learning and in 2018-19 academic year I was fortunate to get an opportunity to teach for the Master of Data Science program at the The University of British Columbia. Since then I’ve been teaching applied machine learning, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing related courses in the Department of Computer Science and the Master of Data Science program. My job titles are Assistant Professor of Teaching and Option Co-Director of the Master of Data Science Vancouver program. In simple language, I try to help students learn computer science and data science material and I also try to help run our Master of Data Science program smoothly.

In the past, I have spent time as a researcher in industry as well as in academia in different cities around the world, including Duluth, Baltimore, Toronto, Ottawa, Stuttgart, and Hamburg.