Profile

What if AI could reason like an engineer?

Sara Shafiee builds AI that helps engineers design smarter. As Senior Researcher / Associate Professor at DTU's Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering, she works where artificial intelligence meets complex engineering systems and digital manufacturing, turning decades of engineering knowledge into faster, better decisions.

As Principal Investigator, she leads externally funded research on agentic and multi-agent AI, recommendation systems for product design and configuration, explainable and constraint-driven models, LLM-based evaluation, and synthetic data for industrial applications, including projects funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark. Her group, the Sara Shafiee Lab, combines fundamental research with close industry collaboration, helping companies reuse what they already know, shorten design cycles, and trust the AI they bring into their engineering processes.

She is grateful that this work, and the people behind it, have been recognised along the way, including through the Agnes & Betzy Award, the Nordic Women in Tech Award, the Alexander Foss MADE Award, Innovation Fund Denmark's Industrial Researcher Prize, and best paper awards at IEEE and ICED. For her, these are above all a sign that research built together with industry can make a real difference. She is also a member of CIRP, the International Academy for Production Engineering, and of the Young Academy of Technology, Science and Innovation (YATSI).

Her path has always connected research and practice: before academia she worked as an IT Project Manager and Senior Business Consultant at Haldor Topsøe, and she later founded and led DivERS as its CEO. These experiences still shape her drive to make research matter in practice.

She welcomes students, researchers and industry partners who want to build the next generation of intelligent engineering systems together.

Explore her research map, lab and code on GitHub: https://github.com/sara-shaf