PNNL

Karl Pazdernik is a Chief Data Scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, arriving in the summer of 2017. He has led numerous projects focused on building and evaluating foundation AI models, including National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) projects such as the multi-lab venture, Steel Thread, where he acts as the PI/Science Lead. He has also led the development of International AI Workshops through the Department of State to highlight the CBRN Risks of AI. He is also a Research Associate Professor at North Carolina State University (NCSU) and is involved in the American Statistical Association (ASA) in both the Section on Statistics in Defense and National Security (SDNS) and the Section on Statistics in Text Analytics (STA), having held positions as both the Chair and Program Chair in each section.

His research has focused on the dynamic modeling of multi-modal data with a particular interest in text analytics, spatial statistics, pattern recognition, anomaly detection, uncertainty quantification, and computer vision. Projects have spanned topics that include natural language processing of multilingual unstructured financial data, multimodal learning in scientific literature and nonproliferation, anomaly detection in combined open-source data streams, automated biosurveillance and disease forecasting, and deep learning for defect detection and element mass quantification in nuclear materials. He received a Ph.D. in Statistics from Iowa State University and was a postdoctoral scholar at NCSU under the Consortium for Nonproliferation Enabling Capabilities.

Iowa State University
Doctor of Philosophy, Statistics

Saint John's University
Bachelor of Arts, Mathematics