Omar Khattab is an Assistant Professor at MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a PI at MIT CSAIL. Omar’s research develops models, algorithms, and abstractions for building reliable and scalable AI systems. Among other efforts, he created the ColBERT retrieval model, which has helped shape the modern landscape of neural information retrieval, and the DSPy framework for building and optimizing language model programs. His lines of work on ColBERT, DSPy, GEPA, and RLMs form the basis of influential open-source projects, together downloaded millions of times per month, and have sparked applications at dozens of organizations. Omar’s Ph.D. at Stanford CS was supported by the Apple Scholars in AI/ML PhD Fellowship and his work received a Best Paper Award at SIGIR 2025