Lillian Thistlethwaite, PhD, is a Senior Data Scientist and leads ILW’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) Center of Excellence (CoE), guiding cross-functional teams in the design and delivery of mission-aligned, production-ready NLP solutions. Deeply passionate about both algorithmic innovation and end-to-end pipeline development, she has over 12 years of experience building machine learning and AI systems that integrate structured domain knowledge—such as rules, ontologies, and graphs—with statistical and deep learning models. Her work has spanned multiple research domains, including computational biology, clinical genomics, political science, intelligence analysis, and language-centered automation systems, supporting a range of health and defense government clients.

Since joining ILW, Lillian has helped shape the company’s approach to natural language processing and generative AI by emphasizing interpretability, constrained learning, and cost-aware system design. She is also actively exploring multimodal modeling approaches, with the goal of bringing these capabilities into future NLP and GenAI efforts at ILW. She works closely with teams and clients to translate rapidly evolving GenAI capabilities into practical, trustworthy systems, ensuring advanced methods align with real-world requirements and operational constraints. In her role, she contributes technical direction across NLP and GenAI efforts and supports solution development that aligns advanced methods with real-world use cases.

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.

Check Us Out on Social