Bio

Donald Metzler is a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He leads a group of software engineers and research scientists focused on the foundations of generative AI and large language modeling, with an emphasis on AI-generated text and code detection, freshness and temporal reasoning, RL scaling, and Agents. His group’s work has contributed to major launches across Gemini, the Gemini app, Search, Cloud, and Chrome.

At Google, he previously led the Apps Search Quality and Intelligence team, which drove a series of major information-finding-related innovations to consumer and enterprise users of Gmail and Drive.

Prior to joining Google, he was a Research Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California (USC) and a Senior Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research. He is a Distinguished Member of the ACM, a member of the SIGIR Academy, and the recipient of Test of Time awards at SIGIR 2026, CIKM 2021, and ECIR 2017, along with multiple Best Paper awards. He has served as the Program Chair of the WSDM and ICTIR conferences and on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on Information Systems, ACM Transactions on the Web, and the Information Retrieval Journal. He has published over 100 research papers, holds 14 issued US patents, and is the author of “A Feature-Centric View of Information Retrieval” and a co-author of “Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice”.