Lillian Thistlethwaite, PhD, is a Senior Data Scientist and leads ILW’s Multimodal AI & Knowledge Systems Center of Excellence (CoE), guiding cross-functional teams in the research, development, and delivery of advanced AI solutions. With over 13 years of experience in data science, she specializes in neural modeling, knowledge-integrated AI, and the development of intelligent systems that combine learned representations with structured domain knowledge. Her technical interests span multimodal learning, neurosymbolic AI, knowledge graphs, explainable AI (XAI), and evaluation of large language models (LLMs). Her work has crossed multiple research domains, including computational biology, clinical genomics, political science, intelligence analysis, and language-centered automation, supporting a range of health and defense government clients.

Since joining ILW, Lillian has helped shape the company’s approach to generative AI and knowledge-driven systems, emphasizing interpretability, rigorous evaluation, constrained reasoning, and practical system design. As CoE Lead, she is expanding this focus toward multimodal neural architectures and methods for integrating symbolic knowledge and reasoning into learned systems. Passionate about both algorithmic innovation and end-to-end pipeline development, she works closely with technical teams and clients to translate emerging AI capabilities into reliable, mission-aligned solutions that balance technical sophistication with real-world operational constraints.

Outside of work, Lillian is a mom to two young humans and one cat, and the wife of an incredible husband. She spends most weekends playing “monster” in the backyard and values creativity in all its forms. In quieter moments, she enjoys reconnecting with long-standing interests such as music composition, woodworking, reading fiction, and, occasionally, Netflix.

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