Bonaventure F. P. Dossou

I am Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, a 3rd-year Ph.D. candidate, AI researcher, author, United Nations University scholar, and co-founder of Lanfrica, a platform dedicated to documenting and connecting African language resources. I am also a Computer Science Ph.D. student at McGill University in the NLP group, specializing in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Healthcare under the supervision of Professor Jackie Cheung. I am renowned for integrating Fon, a traditionally underrepresented African language, into Google Translate and for championing the inclusion of marginalized languages on global digital platforms.

My background bridges mathematics, healthcare, and language technology. I hold a Bachelor of Science with honours in Mathematics from Kazan Federal University and a Master of Science with honours in Computer Science and Data Engineering (with a minor in Bioinformatics) from Jacobs University Bremen.

I am widely recognized for my contributions to African language technology. I have created several Afro-centric NLP systems such as FFRTranslate, AfroLM, and the Okwugbe ASR Python library for low-resource speech recognition. My work consistently centers marginalized languages and aims to democratize access to language technologies for communities historically excluded from global digital platforms.

As a researcher, I am deeply committed to bridging advanced technology with real-world impact. My interests span Machine Learning for Healthcare — including drug discovery, gene and phage therapy, and medical imaging — as well as NLP for low-resourced African languages. I am known for delivering high-impact talks at leading AI conferences across academic and industry spheres and for driving research that addresses global challenges through equitable, accessible AI.

Previously, I was a Machine Learning Consultant and Research Scientist at Phagos Biotech, where I developed large-scale language models for genomic sequencing and bacteriophages. Before my PhD, I was a research intern at the Mila Quebec AI Institute working with Yoshua Bengio and Dianbo Liu on drug discovery using Deep Learning and GFlowNets — particularly for Biological Sequence Design and GFlowOut. I also previously worked as an NLP Data Scientist at Roche Canada and as a Research Scientist at ModelisLabs on Health & Pharma-related challenges.

Alongside my academic work, I contribute to the development of NLP technologies for Sub-Saharan African languages at the Masakhane Research Foundation and have collaborated with Google Research on equitable language technologies.

You can find my CV here.