Professional Experience

Research, internships, and industry roles in formal verification, security, and machine learning.

Graduate Research Assistant September 2023 - Present

Khwarizmi Lab, University of Massachusetts Amherst • Amherst, MA

• Built a verification framework to analyze quantum key distribution (QKD) protocols; identified four new vulnerabilities arising from quantum-classical interactions
• Applied formal analysis to U.S. ACH banking systems to uncover security vulnerabilities in the access control and authorization of ACH direct payments

Undergraduate Research Assistant September 2022 - July 2023

Communication Systems and Networks Lab, NUST

• Collaborated in the design and implementation of an event-driven coordination protocol for multi-agent aerial swarms on Raspberry Pi companion computers with Pixhawk/ArduPilot flight controllers
• Designed and optimized leader-follower formation control (flock, line, helical) with dynamic reconfiguration, achieving under 2 min formation-switching latency
• Engineered a mesh networking stack (IEEE 802.11, UDP/TCP, MAVLink) to enable fault-tolerant communication for control coordination in real-time (under 100 ms latency)

Hardware Security Intern June 2022 - September 2022

IC Design Lab, NUST

• Led the design of ENIGMA, a Python framework that automatically inserts logic-locking defenses into hardware designs, protecting IP designs from unauthorized use and reverse engineering
• Designed a parametrized key-insertion system (64-256 bits) with user-defined cell libraries to analyze the impact of logic obfuscation on a chip's area, delay, and power

Machine Learning Intern June 2021 - September 2021

TUKL Deep Learning Lab, NUST

• Implemented an automated pipeline to extract, structure, and preprocess raw court documents
• Fine-tuned Transformer-based models for court-case outcome prediction achieving 83% accuracy