I am a deep learning engineer at NVIDIA, working on frontier model co-design for efficient and agentic inference. Previously, I was a researcher at Microsoft Research + M365 Copilot working on external retrieval and knowledge for LLMs. I graduated from the University of Michigan in May 2022 with a PhD in machine learning.

See Google Scholar for an up-to-date publications list.

Contact: tsafavi [at] nvidia.com

Recent news

• June 2026: Took a break and am back at it! I am heading to NVIDIA to research frontier model co-design for agentic, long-context workloads. Thanks to my amazing collaborators and mentors for a wonderful four years at Microsoft.
• November 2022: Looking forward to giving virtual keynotes on graphs + LMs at the MLoG and KG workshops at ICDM 2022. Thank you to the organizers for the invitations!
• November 2022: Really honored to receive the Kuck Dissertation Prize from UMich CSE for my dissertation! Thank you!
• November 2022: Our paper combining graphs and language models with CascadER will be presented orally at AKBC 2022! Joint work with my awesome collaborators Doug and Tom.
• July 2022: Started at MSR Redmond.
• July 2022: Got an ICML Outstanding Reviewer Award!
• May 2022: Successfully defended my PhD thesis! Thank you to my committee Danai, Paul, Kevyn, and Lu.

Misc (updated periodically)

• My advice on applying for the NSF GRFP, last updated in 2020
• All-time favorite books/audiobooks
  • Middlemarch by George Eliot - written for ‘grown-up people’
  • The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov - a fantastical, subversive, all-time great
  • The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton - elegantly tragic
  • David Copperfield by Charles Dickens - the most Dickensian of all Dickens novels
  • Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin - a devastating confessional
  • Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir - deserves the hype
  • The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro - elegiac, restrained, his best work
  • The Likeness by Tana French - literary crime at its finest
  • The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe - an underrated and explosive work of satire
  • The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson - operatic and surreal
  • War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy - gets at the heart of things