From Syria to Vietnam to France: young AI researcher takes the next leap

As she prepares to graduate from RMIT Vietnam's Master of Artificial Intelligence (AI) program this December on an accelerated pathway, Shirin Shujaa is already looking ahead to her next challenge: a PhD degree in France.

The 23-year-old Syrian will soon begin her doctoral studies at La Rochelle University, where she will study how language models can analyse historical texts and uncover narrative structures in digitised documents.

She met her prospective supervisor at a conference in the Philippines where, as an undergraduate student, she presented two co-authored research papers on large language models and served as a Session Chair at the International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries (ICADL) 2025.

It is a long way from the future Shirin imagined when she first arrived in Vietnam.

“I came here in 2022 to do my Bachelor of Software Engineering at RMIT, and I stayed on for a master’s degree because my university time turned into so much more,” she said.

After earning a place on a funded research project as an undergraduate, Shirin went on to contribute to seven publications in natural language processing (NLP) and responsible AI while at RMIT. Recently, her master's thesis defence was also selected as one of the program's two best presentations.

“I didn't walk in with a fixed plan to become a researcher. I started software engineering just wanting to build things well,” she said.

“It was when I got into NLP and started noticing how bias shows up in language models that research stopped being a class requirement and turned into something I actually wanted to do with my time.”

What began as academic curiosity gradually became a sense of purpose. During her studies, Shirin worked on projects exploring hate speech, sexism and cultural bias in language models, while also developing practical AI applications, including a platform designed to help autistic adults prepare for job interviews.

For Shirin, technology has always been most meaningful when it serves people.

“My research is about making AI systems fairer for everyone. I care about AI reaching the people usually left out of the conversation,” she said. “I'm not interested in AI in the abstract. I'm interested in who it can actually help.”

Along the way, opportunities at RMIT helped accelerate her growth. She won an International Excellence Scholarship from the University from 2022 to 2026 in recognition of her strong academic performance. The support helped her focus on her studies while pursuing research, industry projects and international conference opportunities that would shape her future.​

As her interest in AI deepened, Shirin looked for ways to apply what she was learning beyond the classroom. As an intern at tech company DIGI-TEXX, she trained AI models on Vietnamese medical data and built tools that automate document processing. In her capstone project with Intel Vietnam, she helped develop automation and reporting pipelines that reduced processing time from around four hours to under fifteen minutes while maintaining accuracy.

Shirin also embraced opportunities to challenge herself at competitions, winning first place at the CoverGo AI Hackathon and second place at the RMIT x Katalon Testathon and the Accessibility Design Competition in 2025. She complemented these achievements by volunteering at outreach events for high school students, educators, and the wider community, helping others discover STEM.

As she prepares to leave Vietnam for France, Shirin expects to carry more than academic knowledge with her.

“What I'll take with me from RMIT is the habit of asking, ‘Does this actually hold up?’ before I trust any result,” she said.

But the biggest impact of her years in Vietnam may be personal rather than professional.

“I'll remember how much this place let me become someone I didn't know I had in me, from a first-year software engineering student to someone representing her research on an international stage,” she said.

“Vietnam isn't just where I studied. It's where I became a researcher, and where I found a home I hadn’t expected to find.”

Story: Ngoc Hoang