Santhilata is currently working as a Digital Preservation Specialist at The National Archives. She is specialized in practical applications of ML and AI. She has been working to develop a prototype for text file format identification from the contents of the plain text files using NLP techniques and machine learning algorithms.

Before joining The National Archives, Santhilata worked as researcher at the Francis Crick Institute (London), representing King’s College London. She was teaching Computer Science for over 18 years at King’s College London (UK) and Birla Institute of Technology (BITS-Pilani, Goa) and University of Mumbai (India). She led the research wing at the University of Mumbai where she developed ergonomic designs for ‘4-axis robotic arm unit’ for pick and place operations. She received awards and grants for the same.

With a background in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering, Santhilata received her PhD in Computer Science from King’s College London. Her research interests include natural language processing, reinforcement learning, distributed computing, caching and optimization mechanisms for data transfers across distributed databases.