Slav Petrov is a Distinguished Scientist / Senior Research Director co-leading Google's large models effort. His work has been recognized with multiple Best Paper Awards (ACL'11, NAACL'12, ACL'16) and provides better language capabilities to billions of users in a variety of Google products spanning Web Search, Assistant, Ads, Translate & Cloud. Slav is the recipient of the 2014 John Atanasoff Award by the President of Bulgaria and a World Champion at RoboCup 2004. For many years, Slav taught Statistical Natural Language Processing at New York University. He holds a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley.

Slav has spent roughly equal parts of his life in Bulgaria, Germany and the US. Whenever Bulgaria plays Germany in soccer, he supports Bulgaria.