I am a research leader and strategist at the intersection of AI, personalization, and large-scale production. As Senior Director of Research and Head of Tech Research at Spotify, I lead an interdisciplinary organization advancing the science and technology of personalization, spanning search, recommendation, user engagement, and evaluation. My current focus is on how Generative AI transforms large-scale retrieval and recommendation, bridging foundational research and real-world impact.

Since joining Spotify in 2017, I have built and led a global research organization driving innovation in search, recommendation, and generative technologies. Grounded in servant leadership, I foster collaboration, mentorship, and creative autonomy across teams. Our work has shaped Spotify’s personalization and discovery experiences and informed the company’s technology strategy as it evolves in the Generative-AI era. I have strengthened Spotify’s external research presence by curating the Spotify Research website (now featuring 90+ blog posts) and by representing the company through keynotes and panels at premier forums including RecSys and PKDD-ECML.

Beyond Spotify, I hold an honorary professorship at University College London and am a Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Amsterdam. Before joining Spotify, I led research teams at Yahoo focused on advertising quality and user engagement in news, search, and user-generated content. Earlier in my career, I held a Microsoft Research/RAEng Research Chair at the University of Glasgow and served as Professor of Information Retrieval at Queen Mary University of London.

I am an active member of the information retrieval and recommendation systems communities, serving as Program Co-Chair for SIGIR 2015, WWW 2018, WSDM 2020, and CIKM 2023, and as a senior program committee member for conferences such as WSDM, KDD, WWW, and SIGIR. I have authored over 270 papers, including 40+ from Spotify, and frequently share research perspectives through talks and podcasts, including ACM ByteCast and the AI Business Podcast. I was nominated for the VentureBeat Women in AI Awards for Research in 2022 and 2023.

I strive to enable excellence through collaboration and scientific rigor, creating environments where innovation translates into measurable technical and product impact, and where research advances the technologies and experiences that reach millions of users.

Photo credit: mathias-erhart (Creative Commons BY).