Lilian Elewachi
Lilian O. Elekwachi, PhD, is an environmental scientist and sustainable aquaculture expert whose work bridges deep scientific expertise with emerging applications in artificial intelligence. She holds a PhD in Environmental Sciences from the University of Massachusetts Boston and has a multidisciplinary background spanning climate science, aquaculture, water chemistry, hydrology, ecology, environmental toxicology, and sustainability. Based in Boston, Lilian has built a career that moves fluidly between academia, applied research, federal policy, and industry, including hands-on experience owning and operating a commercial fish farm. Her professional journey includes evaluating environmental and aquaculture impacts within federal environmental policy at NOAA, conducting clinical and research environmental monitoring at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, and contributing to community-based engineering and sustainability projects at MIT D-Lab as part of her PhD. She also serves as a Marine Biology Lecturer and Lab Lead at Suffolk University, where she brings field-based instruction and real-world application into the classroom. Across these roles, Lilian has remained deeply committed to advancing sustainable food systems, aquatic science, and environmental decision-making. In recent years, Lilian has become a leader at the intersection of environmental science and AI, serving as a Senior Domain Expert at Mercor Intelligence, an AI Research Fellow with the MOVE Fellowship at Handshake AI, and an Environmental Science Evaluator at Outlier AI. In these positions, she has built and curated domain-specific training datasets, evaluated large language model outputs for scientific rigor, identified reasoning failure modes, and collaborated with machine learning engineers to strengthen model accuracy and interpretability. Passionate about democratizing high-quality scientific knowledge, Lilian is driven to build AI systems that reason accurately and responsibly in support of environmental sustainability and global impact.
• UMass Boston- Ph.D.
• 2030STEM x BWF Fellowship Award 2025