About

Hi, I’m a.j.djalali

I was born in El Paso, Texas. My father worked for Marriott Hotels, which meant our family moved — a lot. Growing up, home was never one place. It was wherever we unpacked next:

All that moving meant I attended three different high schools: Western Albemarle in Virginia, St. John’s School in Guam, and Hopkins High School in Minnesota, where I graduated. Each one dropped me into a completely different world — new people, new culture, new everything. You learn to adapt fast, or you don’t adapt at all.

The Academic Road Link to heading

After high school I headed to Northwestern University, where I studied linguistics and discovered that language was something you could take apart and study with the same rigor people bring to math or physics. I graduated Cum Laude with Honors and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.

From there I spent a year at the University of Amsterdam as a Fulbright Fellow, studying mathematical logic, philosophy, and linguistics at the Institute of Logic, Language, and Computation. Amsterdam was formative — it sharpened the way I think about formal systems and gave me the foundation for what came next.

That next chapter was a PhD at Stanford University, where I worked on formal semantics and mathematical linguistics. My dissertation tackled the syntax and semantics of ordinary comparative constructions in English — the kind of sentences everyone uses but no one thinks twice about.

From Academia to Industry and Back Link to heading

Toward the end of grad school I interned at Nuance Communications, which gave me my first taste of building language technology at scale. That led to ClearGraph, where I helped build natural language interfaces for data — work that caught Tableau’s attention. They acquired ClearGraph, and I spent the next few years creating the NL technology behind Ask Data. When Tableau was acquired by Salesforce, I stayed on as a Software Engineering Architect and Principal Member of Technical Staff.

During grad school I also founded a private tutoring practice in the Bay Area, working with high school students on everything from English and Spanish to Calculus, AP Programming, AP Biology, and SAT/ACT prep. Every one of my students scored above 30 on the ACT and was accepted into the college of their choice.

Before all the tech and academia, I cut my teeth as a writer. In high school I freelanced for the Pacific Daily News in Guam, covering the local lifestyle scene — musicians, bars, restaurants, and cultural happenings. That itch never went away. During grad school at Stanford I wrote for Doommantia, an online music magazine dedicated to underground doom and stoner metal. I reviewed albums like The Sword – Warp Riders, Mose Giganticus – Gift Horse, Dirty Woman – Demon Lover, and Kvelertak – S/T, and wrote longer pieces like revisiting Sleep’s Holy Mountain.

I later served as Director of Operations & Content Strategy at Style at a Certain Age, a nationally recognized fashion and lifestyle brand, where I led editorial strategy, doubled site traffic, and drove substantial revenue growth.

In 2023 I co-founded PerceptivePanda, an AI startup that was accepted into StartX ‘24. PerceptivePanda was acquired by Zapier in 2025.

Today I’m Research Faculty and Senior Research Engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where I get to combine everything — linguistics, AI, and software engineering — under one roof.

For the full professional rundown, see my Resume. My academic work is collected on the Publications page.

Family Link to heading

My wife, Kelly, is a former member of Deerhoof and co-founder of 7 Year Rabbit Cycle. She now works alongside my mother at Style at a Certain Age.

My mother, Beth, founded Style at a Certain Age — a nationally recognized fashion and lifestyle brand inspiring women to age with grace, strength, and beauty.

My father was a hotelier and one of the youngest general managers at Marriott Hotels.

I also became an uncle twice over this year.

Outside the Terminal Link to heading

When I’m not writing code or reading papers, I’m usually deep in one of a few obsessions.

I ride a 2015 Indian Scout — there’s nothing like two wheels and an open road to clear your head.

I’m a workwear and Japanese denim enthusiast. Iron Heart, Momotaro, Sugar Cane, The Flat Head, Studio D’Artisan, Samurai Jeans on the Japanese denim side; Levi’s, Lee, Wrangler, and Dickies for the American classics; Filson, Pendleton, Ginew, Schott NYC, Buzz Rickson’s, Red Wing, Master Supply Co, and Vans for heritage workwear and everyday staples. If it’s built to last and gets better with age, I’m interested.

I collect guitars — electrics and acoustics, old and new. And I’m an audiophile and vinyl collector, always hunting for the right pressing of the right record to play through the right setup.