Biography: Dr. Chundi is a professor in the computer science department in the College of Information Science and Technology at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. She has deep research expertise in language processing, representation learning, computer vision. She has led and contributed to federally funded research projects in biofilm-material discovery, biomedical image analysis, text mining, adaptive learning, and computational bioengineering. Her scholarly record includes recent publications in AI-driven biofilm analysis, biomedical image segmentation, intelligent learning systems, and computational bioengineering, as well as a CRC Press book on machine learning in 2D material sciences and several U.S. patents.  She has also held research and technical positions at HP Labs, Agilent Labs, GE Corporate Research Center, and Tata Research Center.

Dr. Chundi served as a program director for the NSF SBIR/STTR Program from 2022 - 2025. As an SBIR/STTR program director, she was primarily responsible for evaluating and funding proposals in Advanced Systems for Scalable Analytics (AA), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) topics. She evaluated (with the help of NSF panelists) hundreds of Phase I and Phase II SBIR/STTR proposals on topics such as AA, AI, Space, and Wireless, and made funding decisions about early-stage technologies that deserve federal R&D support, and then guided these startups toward commercial and societal impact. She awarded funding to dozens of early-stage startups in the IT, financial, biomedical, and agriculture domains located all over the U.S.

While at NSF, she also evaluated and funded several proposals submitted to the NSF POSE Program.

Her current research interests are in developing novel algorithms to enhance the current multimodal AI and VLMs (vision-language models). She is also passionate about supporting early-stage entrepreneurs in the artificial intelligence.

Her CV is available here.