CV

Curriculum vitae of Alex Gichamba — researcher and engineer working on speech and language generation at CMU Africa. Last updated July 2026.

Contact Information

Name Alex Gichamba
Professional Title Researcher & Engineer — Speech and Language Generation
Email alexgichamba@ieee.org
Website https://alexgichamba.com

Professional Summary

I am a researcher and engineer interested in generative modeling for language and speech, particularly speech synthesis and speech-to-speech systems. My work spans efficient speech representations for speech synthesis, speech translation and real-time speech-to-speech systems, with a focus on reliable conversational AI that serves both high and low-resource languages.

Experience

  • 2025 - Present

    Kigali, Rwanda

    Research Associate
    Carnegie Mellon University Africa
    • Research and development of conversational systems for real time applications
    • Conducting research on speech generation with efficient representations
    • Pretrained a multilingual speech LLM for 20+ languages
    • Developing code bases for efficient distributed data parallel training
    • Managing the team’s GPU compute allocation
  • 2025 - 2026

    Remote

    Machine Learning Researcher
    Intron Inc.
    • Developed multilingual text to speech models for commercial applications
    • Optimized models for inference throughput through post-training quantization
    • Planned and coordinated collection of spontaneous speech datasets for multispeaker text to speech
  • 2024 - 2024

    Kigali, Rwanda

    Summer Research Assistant
    Carnegie Mellon University Africa
    • Investigated weak supervision and automatic annotation in distributed learning settings
    • Investigated applying vehicular networks as privacy-preserving distributed learning platforms in Kigali

Education

  • 2023 - 2024

    Kigali, Rwanda

    MS
    Carnegie Mellon University
    Electrical and Computer Engineering
    • GPA: 3.92/4.0
    • Relevant coursework: Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning for Signal Processing, Question Answering with LLMs, Stochastic Processes, Systems Software Engineering
  • 2018 - 2023

    Nairobi, Kenya

    BSc
    University of Nairobi
    Electrical and Electronics Engineering
    • Grade: First Class Honours

Publications

Teaching Experience

  • Graduate Teaching Assistant, Carnegie Mellon University (Aug 2024 – Dec 2024). Teaching Assistant for 11785: Introduction to Deep Learning. Led recitations on Ablations and Hyperparameter Tuning, Automatic Differentiation, and CTC and Beam Search; developed quizzes on transformers and large language models; prepared assignments on language modeling and automatic speech recognition (ASR); held office hours and responded to student questions on Piazza; co-maintained the course website.
  • Guest Lecture, 11411/11611 NLP, Carnegie Mellon University (Nov 2024). Gave a guest lecture on Question Answering with Small LLMs to the Fall 2024 NLP class, covering information retrieval, approximate nearest neighbour search, dense passage embeddings, retrieval-augmented generation, and textual entailment recognition.

Skills

Programming Languages: Python, C++, C, Bash
Tools and Frameworks: PyTorch, HF Transformers, ESPnet, Kaldi, DeepSpeech, FAISS, Docker
Distributed Training: Distributed Data Parallel (DDP), Fully Sharded Data Parallel (FSDP), multi-GPU / multi-node training, mixed precision, post-training quantization
Infrastructure & Cloud: Slurm, GPU cluster management, AWS, GCP

Awards

  • 2024
    Winner, Specializing Large Language Models for Telecom Networks in 5G Challenge
    ITU AI/ML in 5G Challenge

    Developed the leading QA systems for both tracks of the challenge, and showed that small specialized LLMs can significantly surpass larger leading LLMs that are not optimized for a domain.

  • 2023
    Best Final Year Student
    University of Nairobi, Department of Electrical and Information Engineering

    Awarded for top overall academic performance in the graduating class.

  • 2023
    Best Final Year Project
    University of Nairobi, Department of Electrical and Information Engineering

    Recognized for the highest-rated final year engineering project in the department.

Professional Societies and Memberships

IEEE Member: 2020 – Present
International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) Member: 2024 – Present