Zoorna AI is the applied AI practice of Dr. Karine Megerdoomian, a computational linguist and AI systems architect with 20+ years of experience in natural language processing, generative AI, and agentic systems. She has been building AI that works in the real world since before large language models existed, and that depth of perspective shapes everything Zoorna AI does.

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Karine spent 18 years at the MITRE Corporation, most recently as Principal AI Engineer, leading multi-year applied AI research, development, and evaluation programs for federal sponsors including the US Courts, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Census Bureau, and Department of Defense partners. Her work spanned multilingual NLP, narrative and event analytics, structured information extraction, AI evaluation, and responsible AI governance for high-stakes deployment contexts. Her current focus extends that foundation into generative and agentic AI system design, where she brings the same rigor and operational discipline to the most recent generation of AI technologies.

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What sets her work apart is linguistic depth. Most AI practitioners come from computer science or statistics. Karine comes from linguistics, with formal training in syntax, morphology, cross-linguistic structure, and the computational modeling of language. That foundation surfaces failure modes that purely data-driven approaches miss, especially in multilingual, cross-cultural, and high-stakes deployment contexts.

She holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Southern California, a master's with secondary specialization in neural computation (USC), a Bachelor of Science in Physics, a graduate certificate in Computational Social Science, a Chief AI Officer certification from World AI University, and completed the Chief Technology Officer Program at the Wharton School of Business.
 

Her recent and forthcoming publications include co-authored work on cultural-pragmatic alignment in LLMs (EMNLP 2025), a book chapter on Persian language pedagogy (Routledge, 2026), and prior work in PNAS, EMNLP, NAACL, ACL, COLING, LREC, and leading theoretical linguistics journals. She has served as NSF Linguistics Program reviewer, organized the SilkRoadNLP Workshop at EACL 2026, and serves on the doctoral committee of a PhD candidate at Université Paris Cité.

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The mission behind the practice: Karine also founded and directs the Zoorna Institute for Language, AI, and Society, a nonprofit research and education entity advancing multilingual NLP, low-resource language technology, and AI literacy for underrepresented communities. Zoorna AI and the Zoorna Institute share a conviction that AI built without linguistic depth and cultural awareness will keep failing the people who need it most.