Wigdan Mekki Medani holds a PhD in Information Science and Technology. She is a research engineer and linguist with over 20 years of experience in Natural Language Processing (NLP), multilingual resources, and computational linguistics.
She graduated from Université Lumière Lyon 2 and later joined the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) as a Research Coordinator at the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC). She has also worked at the University of Maryland (CASL). Wigdan has extensive experience leading and contributing to international research projects at prestigious institutions, including INRIA, INALCO, Orange R&D, and the University of Caen Normandie.
She is a member of the Sudanese Studies Association and Amnesty International, and she founded the Philly Rally for Darfur in 2003 in Philadelphia.
She currently provides translation and interpretation support for refugees seeking asylum in France. Wigdan has also built a multilingual lexical database to help refugees navigate French administrative terminology—a project developed in partnership with INALCO (MIGRAarlect). She is also the niece of the late, prominent human rights lawyer Amin Mekki Medani.
