Hello! नमस्ते।

I'm a first-year Computer Science Ph.D. student at Columbia University in the wonderful New York City, where I'm fortunate to be advised by Prof. Suman Jana.

I'm interested in improving the reliability, reasoning abilities and our understanding of language models. Language models (and systems built over them) are very brittle; my goal is to understand why this is so and the principles that may fix their brittleness.

If you believe I can help you in any way or you'd just like to chat, message me at: nihal.jain [at] columbia [dot] edu. I'm also available at the following channels:
Nihal Jain

Recent past

Before starting my Ph.D., I was an Applied Scientist in the Amazon Q Developer team, where I trained large language models (LLMs) for code generation.

Even before that, I obtained an M.S. in Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, USA) and a B.E. in Computer Science at the Birla Institute of Technology & Science (BITS), Pilani (Hyderabad Campus, India). During these years, I've had the pleasure of working on several cool AI projects with brilliant colleagues at labs like Adobe Research and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

I grew up in Mumbai, India, and the chaotic similarities between the cities probably explain why I love New York City so much.

Other interests

Outside of my research, I'm interested in pretty much everything. However, my fascination for astronomy, philosophy and tennis stand out. I also write poetry sometimes.

This website

Loosely inspired by this, I started developing this site on my own in 2022. Then ChatGPT came around. Since then I've been collaborating with some AI tool (currently Claude Code) to make this site better.

I also blog about topics that interest me and maintain notes on subjects I learn about. We'll see how long I can keep this up.
September 2025
Started Ph.D. in Computer Science at Columbia University in New York City