Brendan Quinn
Lead AI Engineer at Northwestern University
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolBrendan Quinn is a Lead AI Engineer with 13 years at Northwestern University, where he drives generative AI and ML strategy to modernize digital collections and library systems. He blends hands-on software craftsmanship in Python, Elixir/Phoenix, and Ruby/Rails with cloud-native architectures on AWS and Azure to deliver scalable, vectorized search and LLM-powered discovery workflows. A former digital initiatives librarian with an MLIS, he uniquely pairs domain knowledge of archives and repositories with production ML integration—improving resource discoverability rather than just building models. Brendan is active in the Samvera open-source community and advises on institutional generative AI policy as a member of Northwestern’s AI Advisory Committee. Regularly speaking at industry conferences, he focuses on practical, reproducible AI methods for academic libraries and novel approaches to embedding AI into legacy repository systems.
13 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
MLIS, Library and Information Science, MLIS, Library and Information Science at Dominican UniversityBA, History, BA, History at University of Colorado Boulder
Github Skills (51)
pandora10
elixir10
wave10
media-library10
iiif10
transcoding10
video-player10
graphql10
audio-player10
react10
presentation-layer9
rails9
csharp9
stitches9
blacklight9
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
nulib/authoritex
May 2020 - Mar 2022
An Elixir library for searching and fetching controlled vocabulary authority terms
Contributions:11 reviews, 35 commits, 25 PRs in 1 year 10 months
elixir
nulib/mets_converter
Mar 2017 - Oct 2019
Converts METS schema encoded XML to YML
Contributions:2 PRs, 9 pushes, 3 branches in 2 years 7 months
xml
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