Mirella Lapata

Head of AI Research

Mirella Lapata, FRSE, is a global deep learning pioneer. She is consistently ranked in the top 5 worldwide in Natural Language Processing. She pioneered deep learning for text generation, replacing rigid pipelines with trainable models. Her breakthroughs in planning-based methods reshaped the field. Lapata has won numerous awards, including a Turing fellowship, and the 2025 Ada Lovelace Award in Computer Science, the British Computer Society Karen Spärck Jones Award and election to Academia Europaea.

Her founding of the Edinburgh Laboratory for Integrated Artificial Intelligence (ELIAI) and strategic collaborations with tech leaders like Google DeepMind and Amazon demonstrate her ability to translate cutting-edge research into practical applications.

At Multiscale, Professor Lapata’s pioneering work in AI and language understanding is instrumental in decoding complex biological data across diverse life forms. Her expertise in developing sophisticated AI systems that can interpret and generate complex information is helping revolutionise our understanding of biological systems, from microscopic organisms to human disease.