CV

Last updated 22 May 2026.

Education

New York University — M.Sc. in Data Science · 2019–2021 · GPA 3.972 / 4 Nirma University — B.Tech in Computer Engineering · 2015–2019 · GPA 8.15 / 10

Experience

SimPPL — Co-founder

July 2022 — present · Ahmedabad, India

• Lead a team of 8–10 building research-backed tools to improve trust on the social internet for 100M+ users in 6 countries with the UN, New York Public Radio, Sunday Times, Deutsche Welle, Jagran News, and 10+ global partners.
• Apply machine learning to help local and global newsrooms, fact-checkers, non-profits, and civil society organizations better understand their impact and audiences.
• Led media literacy partnership with Deutsche Welle (DW) to educate journalists about generative AI and the role of media organizations in combating mis-, dis-, and malinformation (MDM).
• Raised USD 350,000 in grants from AWS, Google, Wikimedia Foundation, Mozilla, NYC Media Lab, and Goethe Institut.
• 16+ publications at ICML, NeurIPS, AAAI, ICWSM, IC2S2, dg.o, Stanford TSRC, C+J, Truth and Trust Online.
• Working with The Times & The Sunday Times, Deutsche Welle, the Yale Daily News, Fundamedios, and others. See parrot.report.

University of Mannheim — Inaugural Gustav Struve Fellow in Global Responsible AI

February 2026 — present · Mannheim, Germany

• Joined the University of Mannheim to teach a new, exclusive workshop, “AI Product Development”, focusing on practical industry applications and ethical design principles.
• Supported by the Chair of Social Data Science and the Chair of SME Research and Entrepreneurship.

Sakhi — Co-founder and CTO

July 2024 — December 2025 · Ahmedabad, India

• MIT- and UNICEF-incubated tech venture improving women’s health literacy through AI-informed, human-in-the-loop personalized interventions on WhatsApp.
• Launched pilots with 500 families in Bangladesh and India.
• Won USD 62,500 in grants from AWS, MIT IDEAS, Delta-V, UNICEF, and UNDP.
• Presented at Prototypes for Humanity and the World Bank.

Bombora — Data Scientist

July 2021 — July 2024 · New York, NY

• Led project from ideation to implementation using deterministic data and graph algorithms to generate truth sets for Identity ML models.
• Outlined metrics to evaluate model performance and business contribution for data source impact assessment.
• Updated ML processes, reducing process time by 30% through improved feature generation, labeled data creation, and production deployment.
• Researched NLP solutions to enhance B2B intent signals and improve customer onboarding.
• Created labeled dataset and trained prototype model to detect false IP-to-domain associations, improving performance by 10%.

Gumshoe / MuckRock — Data Scientist

Feb 2022 — June 2022 · New York, NY

• Developed Gumshoe, an NLP tool that helps journalists identify task-relevant text in large FOIA email corpora; evaluated performance across multiple datasets.
• Documented findings while highlighting limitations and the potential for misleading results, communicating to a multidisciplinary team.

Bombora — Data Scientist Intern

Sept 2020 — May 2021 · New York, NY

• Examined and visualized the temporal evolution of B2B data distribution using TSNE, clustering, PCA, kernel density estimation, KS tests, and geospatial visualizations.
• Implemented Logistic Regression, Random Forest, and XGBoost classifiers for IP-type classification; evaluated using Precision, Recall, F1, and ROC-AUC.

Research (NYU)

Department of Environmental Studies, NYU — Graduate Research Assistant

July 2020 — May 2021

• Scraped and queried public funding/grantmaking databases (incl. USDA) to create databases and high-quality visualizations.
• Used Named Entity Recognition and topic modelling to ascertain how public dollars are spent on grants and projects.

New York University — Junior Data Scientist

June 2020 — Aug 2020

• Analyzed and preprocessed signals generated by ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs).
• Designed a neural network to predict Xmax for UHECRs from time-series detector signals (error 0.12).

New York University — Junior Data Scientist

March 2020 — Aug 2020

• Processed million-row data from CRSP and Compustat; merged tables in SQL to derive daily stock prices and returns for S&P 500 constituents.
• Implemented regression models to model the impact of NLP-derived news signals (NER, entity sentiment) on market volatility.

Courant Institute, NYU — Graduate Research Assistant

Jan 2020 — June 2020

• Worked with Prof. Mohamed Zahran to predict the performance of a parallel program on a parallel machine using performance data from prior programs/machines.

Department of Environmental Studies, NYU — Graduate Research Assistant

Jan 2020 — Feb 2020

• Worked with Prof. David Kanter on visualizing trade-offs in Sustainable Agriculture across 216 countries (1960–2016).

Talks

• 2025 — UK–India AIxcelerate
• 2025 — LIRNEasia, Day of Information Disorder (Colombo)
• 2025 — MisinfoCon
• 2025 — Ashoka University CS Colloquium, AI Against Misinformation
• 2024 — Prototypes for Humanity
• 2024 — Responsible Computing Challenge

Organizing

• 2025 — SheLeads
• 2025 — A Teacher in the Loop
• 2025 — NextGenAI Fellowship
• 2024 — DW: Media Literacy
• 2024 — Responsible Innovation Day
• 2024 — SimPPL Fellowships

Fellowships

• Feb 2026 — present — Inaugural Gustav Struve Fellow in Global Responsible AI, University of Mannheim
• 2025 — Global Changemakers
• 2025 — Center for AI and Digital Policy — Research Group; country lead, Malta (CAIDP 2026 Index)

Skills

Programming: Python, PyTorch, MySQL, GCP, BigQuery, Docker, Bash, git, C++, HTML/CSS

Coursework

Graduate: Machine Learning · Deep Learning · Natural Language Understanding · Big Data and Analytics (TA) · Time Series Analysis · Causal Inference

Undergraduate: Information Retrieval · Artificial Intelligence · Database Management Systems · Operating Systems

Selected Publications

For a complete list see Publications or Google Scholar.

1. H. Liu, W. Huang, D.A. Mungra, S.R. Bowman. Precise task formalization matters in Winograd schema evaluations. arXiv preprint, 2020.
2. A. Bollington, M. DeLonge, D. Mungra. Closing research investment gaps for a global food transformation. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 2021.
3. C. Vania, P.M. Htut, W. Huang, D. Mungra. Comparing test sets with item response theory. arXiv preprint, 2021.
4. K. Weston, V. Janfaza, A. Taur, D. Mungra. Post-Silicon Customization Using Deep Neural Networks. Architecture of Computing Systems, Springer, 2023.
5. S. Mahmood, A. Das, D. Mungra, N. Surana, M. Yadav. How social media influencers are scaling surrogate political campaigns in global majority elections. 2024.
6. S.S. Mehta, D. Mungra. Credible Agentic Communication using WikiAgents. Wikimedia Research Fund, 2025.
7. A. Thakkar, D. Mungra, A. Agrawal. Improving the performance of sentiment analysis using enhanced preprocessing technique and artificial neural network. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 2022.
8. D. Mungra, A. Agrawal, A. Thakkar. A voting-based sentiment classification model. Intelligent Communication, Control and Devices, Springer, 2019.
9. A. Thakkar, D. Mungra. Sentiment analysis: an empirical comparison between various training algorithms for artificial neural network. International Journal of Intelligent Engineering Informatics, 2020.
10. D. Mungra, A. Agrawal, P. Sharma, S. Tanwar. PRATIT: a CNN-based emotion recognition system using histogram equalization and data augmentation. Multimedia Tools and Applications, Springer, 2020.

Selected Studies

Applied research with newsroom and civil-society partners. For the full list with press coverage, see Studies.

• How social media influencers are scaling surrogate political campaigns in Global Majority elections — with Tech Global Institute. Multi-country study (India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Philippines, Kenya) finding influencer-generated political content drives 50%+ higher engagement than non-political content; exposes a platform-policy gap on creator-led political messaging.
• From homophobia to assault: The gendered landscape of Bangladesh’s political disinformation — with Tech Global Institute Infolab. Maps how political disinformation in Bangladesh weaponizes gendered abuse against women and minority candidates. Coverage in The Daily Star and Prothom Alo.
• How Facebook has become a political battleground in Bangladesh — with Tech Global Institute. Analyzed nearly 500K pieces of content (98M interactions) to map how Bangladeshi political parties run sophisticated information networks ahead of national elections.

Contact

dhara@simppl.org · LinkedIn · GitHub · Google Scholar