Sarvnaz is an associate professor of Natural Language Processing at Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (DSAI), Faculty of IT, Monash University. She was a principal research scientist at CSIRO for over 14 years, and a researcher at NICTA for 4 years. Sarvnaz has nearly two decades of experience working in NLP (Natural Language Processing) and Search and Information Retrieval (IR) domains. She applies her expertise at the intersection of Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning on different real-world projects, in multidisciplinary settings, including health, climate adaptation and agriculture. She has successfully led multiple projects in the NLP/IR space over the years. Her research interests are in Question answering, Long-form and Temporal Reasoning in LLMs, and summarisation. 

Sarvnaz is active in the research community at large, in Australia and internationally. She is currently the Director of Publicity at the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), the main international professional body for NLP. Sarvnaz is one of the Editors-in-Chief of ACL's Rolling Review and Publicity Editor of the Computational Linguistics Journal. She was the President of the Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA), and an executive committee member (8 years in total). She has served as chair, senior area chair, area chair, and Programme Committee member of several major national and prestigious international conferences and journals, including the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR), the Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), the International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), and the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), and Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL). Through CSIRO and the Data61 scholarship programme, Sarvnaz co-supervises PhD students from different Australian universities. Sarvnaz completed a PhD in Natural Language Processing in 2008 (RMIT University).

Sarvnaz has a PhD in Computer Science, masters in Artificial Intelligence and a bachelor’s degree in software engineering.