I’m a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. I am grateful to be advised by Dr. Lyle H. Ungar and Dr. Sharath C. Guntuku. I completed Ph.D. from the University of Delhi, India. I specialize in culturally aware Natural Language Processing with a focus on AI for Health. Currently, I am working on:

• [cultural alignment x behavioral health] Identifying cross-cultural variations in depression and benchmarking its impact on AI mental health assessment
• [cultural alignment x behavioral health] Building a culturally informed chatbot for virtual vaccine counseling
• [cultural alignment] Extracting social preferences from digital media to build socially aware AI
• [bias and risk in LLMs] Measuring harmful gender norms in entertainment media - a colab with the World Bank

News

• [Oct’25] Paper accepted in EMNLP’25 & NeurIPS’25
• [Oct’25] Excited to be featured in Ideas of India podcast.
• [Jan’25] Long paper accepted in NAACL’25.
• [Dec’24] Awarded Leonard Davis Institute grant of USD 19,500 for multimodal depression risk assessment.
• [Aug’24] Awarded PMCRI grant of USD 50,000 to build a chatbot for virtual HPV vaccine counseling.
• [Mar’24] Our research on racial heterogeniety in depression is covered by Thomson Reuters, Philly Voice, Science News, Penn Medicine News, NIDA
• [Mar’24] Long paper accepted in NAACL’24.
• [Jan’24] Our study “Key language markers of depression depend on race” accepted in PNAS.

Contact

299 Towne, 3330 Walnut Street,
University of Pennsylvania, PA -19104
Webpage: https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~sunnyrai/

✉ sunnyrai at seas.upenn.edu