Nandan Thakur
Postdoctoral Researcher
About
Nandan Thakur is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research India, where he works on constructing enterprise-grade retrieval benchmarks for the evaluation of large-scale retrieval models and reasoning systems. His research focuses on developing benchmarks, datasets, and synthetic data generation techniques for the robust evaluation of retrieval and reasoning systems across domains and languages.
Prior to joining Microsoft Research, Nandan completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, Canada, under the supervision of Prof. Jimmy Lin (opens in new tab), where he developed widely adopted retrieval benchmarks, including BEIR, MIRACL, and FreshStack. He has been co-organizing the TREC Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) Track since 2024. Nandan has accumulated over 4,700 citations (opens in new tab), and his research has been published in leading conferences and journals, including NAACL, ICLR, EMNLP, NeurIPS, SIGIR, and TACL. Prior to his Ph.D., Nandan worked as a Research Assistant at the UKP Lab (opens in new tab) in TU Darmstadt, Germany, under the mentorship of Nils Reimers (opens in new tab) and Prof. Iryna Gurevych (opens in new tab).