On August 15, 2021 Dr. Reno Kriz was appointed to the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence as Research Scientist. Reno comes to us from the Computer Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied under Chris Callison-Burch and Marianna Apidianaki. Reno’s dissertation investigated generation- and retrieval-based techniques for text simplification. At the HLTCOE, Reno hopes to study applications of Sequence-to-Sequence models to a variety of language processing tasks.