About
Sara Shafiee builds AI that helps engineers design smarter. As Senior Researcher / Associate Professor at DTU's Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering, she works where artificial intelligence meets complex engineering systems and digital manufacturing, turning decades of engineering knowledge into faster, better decisions.
As Principal Investigator, she leads externally funded research on agentic and multi-agent AI, recommendation systems for product design and configuration, explainable and constraint-driven models, LLM-based evaluation, and synthetic data for industrial applications, including projects funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark. Her group, the Sara Shafiee Lab, combines fundamental research with close industry collaboration.
Her work has been recognised with the Agnes & Betzy Award, the Nordic Women in Tech Award, the Alexander Foss MADE Award, Innovation Fund Denmark's Industrial Researcher Prize, and best paper awards at IEEE and ICED. She is a member of CIRP, the International Academy for Production Engineering, and of the Young Academy of Technology, Science and Innovation (YATSI). Before academia she worked as an IT Project Manager and Senior Business Consultant at Topsoe, and she later founded and led DivERS as its CEO.
Research themes
Publications
99 publications · updated automatically every week from ORCID · also on DTU Orbit and Google Scholar
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Projects
RECODE: Revolutionizing Engineer-To-Order Companies through Deep Learning and Advanced Recommendation Systems for Optimal Product Design
Advanced Recommendation Systems for Optimal Product Design
Conceptual Modelling for Product Configuration Systems
Group
- Nastaran Moradzadeh Farid, PhD student (2024–): recommendation systems, LLM judges and agentic AI for manufacturing. Orbit · GitHub
- Alireza Taghizadeh, co-supervisor and collaborator. GitHub
I welcome students and researchers interested in AI for engineering and manufacturing: MSc theses, PhD and postdoc positions, research visits and industry collaborations. Get in touch by email. More on the lab page.
Experience
- Current Senior Researcher / Associate Professor, DTU Civil and Mechanical Engineering
- 2022– Member, CIRP (International Academy for Production Engineering)
- 2021– Founder & CEO, DivERS
- 2022–2024 External lecturer, Copenhagen Business School
- 2017–2019 Senior Business Consultant, Topsoe
- 2013–2017 IT Project Manager, Topsoe
- 2014–2017 Industrial PhD, DTU and Topsoe
Awards
- 2025 Agnes & Betzy Award, IDA
- 2022 Nordic Women in Tech Award
- 2022 Best Paper Award, IEEE
- 2021 Best Digital Startup, Venture Cup Denmark
- 2020 Best Paper Award, ConfWS 2020
- 2018 Ambassador / Inno-Woman Role Model, Innovation Fund Denmark
- 2017 Alexander Foss MADE Award
- Industrial Researcher Prize, Innovation Fund Denmark
- Best Paper Award, ICED
Talks and service
- 2026 Keynote: "Agents Across the Configuration Lifecycle: Where Agentic AI Helps and Where Formal Reasoning Must Still Decide"
- 2020 Keynote: "Scrum-based development of configurators"
- 2020 External examiner, PhD defence, UCLouvain
- Reviewer Automation in Construction · Construction Innovation · AI EDAM, and other journals
All 24 activities on Orbit (peer reviews, research visits, guest lectures, talks, examinations) →
Press
- 2025 Agnes & Betzy Award
- 2023 DFF grants to four DTU researchers
- 2023 Nordic Talks
- 2022 Nordic Women in Tech Award
- 2022 Technology to reduce bias in recruitment
Contact
Email: sashaf@dtu.dk
Technical University of Denmark, Koppels Allé, Building 404, Room 232, 2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark