I am currently on the 2025 job market. Please contact me if you would like to discuss potential openings or collaborations!

About me

I am a final-year Ph.D. candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto (UofT), advised by Prof. Stark C. Draper through both Ph.D. and MASc. programs. I work at the intersection of distributed systems, machine learning, and data privacy, with a focus on making distributed ML systems more robust against delays (stragglers) and more privacy-aware in settings like federated learning. I use tools and ideas from error-correction codes, randomized, numerically stable algorithms, and differential privacy (e.g., via the PyTorch-friendly library Opacus) to build reliable and trustworthy ML systems, tested on real-world platforms like Amazon EC2 and Canada’s SciNet HPC cluster.

My work has been supported by 15+ awards, including but not limited to the NSERC CGS D3, DiDi graduate award, Ontario Graduate Scholarship, and MITACS Globalink Research Award, and has led to 9+ first-author publications in top venues across ML, information theory, and signal processing, with 340+ citations on Google Scholar.

Along the way, I’ve explored industry and academic collaborations through internships at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security (Spring 2024), Huawei Accelerated Neural Technology team (Summer 2021), and the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Summer 2015). I’ve also been certified by the International HPC Summer School, Japan 2019, and North American School of Information Theory, USA 2023. Prior to graduate studies, I earned my B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering with a minor in Economics from the Sharif University of Technology.

Outside of research, I enjoy hiking, cooking and testing new dishes, gardening, and trying to win at backgammon or other strategic games.

Recent News

• March 2025: I passed my Ph.D. Final Oral Exam and submitted my Ph.D. thesis, which was accepted as is (with no required revisions)! Huge thanks to my committee members Prof. Stark Draper, Prof. Mohammad Ali Maddah-Ali, Prof. Azarakhsh Malekian, Prof. Dimitrios Hatzinakos, and Prof. Nicolas Papernot!

• February 2025: I was honored to receive the Farid and Diana Najm Graduate Fellowship and Shahid U. H. Qureshi Memorial Scholarship (both awarded to one ECE student per year), as well as the PhD Graduate Award for the second time! Many thanks to the donors for their support and trust in my work!

• January 2025: Our paper, Differentially Private Federated Learning with Time-Adaptive Privacy Spending, has been accepted to ICLR 2025!

• December 2024: I passed my Ph.D. Departmental Oral Exam! Huge thanks to my committee members Prof. Stark Draper, Prof. Nicolas Papernot, and Prof. Dimitrios Hatzinakos.