Help Dragomir Radev's family

Dragomir L. Radev, the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of Computer Science at Yale University, passed away suddenly on Wednesday, March 29th. He left behind his wife, Axinia, and two daughters, Laura and Victoria. Drago was a devoted husband and father who loved his family unconditionally. His daughters, Laura and Victoria, were the light of his life, and he was incredibly proud of them both. His daughter, Victoria, has a disability and requires extensive care. A small group of faculty and researchers from Columbia University, Yale University and the University of Michigan have joined forces to raise money so that Axinia and her family can continue to provide Victoria with the care she needs.

For those of you who don’t know Drago, Drago was an exceptional individual who embodied the qualities of kindness, generosity, intelligence, and dedication in every aspect of his life. He finished his PhD in 1999 at Columbia University, spending one year at IBM Research before joining the University of Michigan as an assistant professor. He spent 16 years at Michigan (during which time he also occasionally taught at Columbia) and subsequently joined Yale in 2017. His research was in the area of natural language processing and he worked on the development of systems to summarize text, answer questions, interface with databases, generate text from data and analyze social media. He was widely recognized for his research and was elected ACL Fellow 2018, ACM Fellow 2015, AAAS Fellow 2020, and AAAI Fellow 2020 in recognition of his work. Drago was driven, creative and passionate about his work, but it was his gentle and patient approach to teaching that won the hearts of his students. He was always willing to go the extra mile to help his students succeed and was admired by all who knew him. Drago had a tremendous impact on the natural language processing community, and his legacy will live on through the countless students whose lives he touched.

All contributions are gifts and no services will be provided to donors by the beneficiary, Axinia Radeva.