Biografie
Dr. Elena Nazarenko is a Senior Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU). Her work spans machine learning, artificial intelligence and data science, with a specialisation in natural language processing (NLP), large language models (LLMs) and agentic AI. She combines a background in theoretical and computational physics with experience in academic research, industry and practice-oriented teaching.
Her expertise includes compact transformer models, alongside the development and evaluation of LLM applications. Her current research interests centre on AI safety, including robustness, reliable evaluation, privacy-preserving NLP and bias in AI systems.
At HSLU, she has continued this work on efficient NLP models. Her paper “SetFit for Automated Essay Scoring: Extending Longformer to a Sentence Transformer”, co-authored with three of her students, received the Best Paper Award at the IEEE Swiss Conference on Data Science 2025 and the Best Poster Award at SwissText 2025.
She co-founded HSLU’s LLMs and AI Agents Bootcamp, co-directed its first three editions and contributed to its development towards LLM applications and AI agents.
Previously, as Head of Data & AI at Witty Works, Elena led the first successful production implementation of SetFit, a framework for few-shot fine-tuning of sentence transformers, on Microsoft Azure in collaboration with Hugging Face. This collaboration was featured in a podcast interview on Hugging Face’s official YouTube channel and a dedicated blog post.
Elena holds a PhD in Physics from Université Grenoble Alpes, with a background in theoretical and computational physics. Her research involved large-scale scientific data analysis, high-performance computing and parallel GPU programming with CUDA. She held a postdoctoral research position at the University of Gothenburg, followed by research and scientific management roles at the Paul Scherrer Institute, part of the ETH Domain. She also undertook further studies in applied data science and machine learning through EPFL Extension School.
