Nikita Saxena

Nikita Saxena is a Research Engineer at Google DeepMind, working on enhancing the multimodal understanding and generation capabilities of Gemini. She closely collaborates with Ishita Dasgupta and Isabelle Guyon.

Previously, Nikita was an AI Resident at Google Research India, where she worked under the guidance of Evan Shelhamer and Alok Talekar. She contributed to developing an AI-powered API for agricultural solutions, using satellite imagery for precision farming and afforestation mapping.

She graduated from BITS Pilani in 2023. For her thesis, Nikita worked at Mila Quebec AI Institute under the supervision of Professor Yoshua Bengio, alongside Moksh Jain and Alex Hernandez Garcia, where she developed GFlowNets for scientific discovery. In the past, she has also had the opportunity of leading one of the early AI initiatives at Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in 2020.

Nikita is a recipient of the DAAD-WISE, Charpak Lab, and MITACS Globalink scholarships. She is committed to supporting the research community and currently serves on the Women in Machine Learning (WiML) Board.

Outside of work, Nikita enjoys reading (feel free to connect with her on Goodreads - she loves book recs!), gardening, trekking, and traveling — especially to off-beaten places (Kazakhstan is next on her list!). She loves trying new cuisines and meeting new people. Since moving to San Francisco in late 2024, she has been focused on building her community and exploring new activities — improv and salsa are next on her list!