Ashrant Aryal, Ph.D.

Yilin Cai is a PhD student in Construction Science at Texas A&M University, advised by Dr. Ashrant Aryal. He holds an M.S. in Architectural and Civil Engineering and a B.S. in Building Environment and Energy Engineering. He also has three years of industry experience as an MEP engineer. His research focuses on building energy modeling, physics-informed machine learning, and AI-driven decision-making for energy retrofit optimization. He also conducts research on the automating the process of additive construction by extrusion.

Email: caiyilin@tamu.edu

Research interests: Building energy modeling, Building optimization & retrofitting, Inverse modeling

Aden Maigag is a PhD student researching the design and evaluation of multi-agent systems for construction cost estimating in large-scale construction projects. His work focuses on how intelligent, collaborative systems can improve scope interpretation, comparable project selection, forecasting, and decision support across complex EPC environments. His research is grounded by industry experience in analytics and estimating workflows at Kiewit.

Email: yam1988@tamu.edu

Research interests: Multi-agent systems, Cost estimating, Construction decision support

Toktam Kouklan is a PhD student at Texas A&M University, advised by Dr. Julie Ann Hartell and Dr. Ashrant Aryal. She holds a B.S. in Interior Architecture and an M.S. in Architectural Engineering. Her research centers on Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ), the impact of cross-modal correspondences, and their role in reducing stress in residential spaces. With a background in professional interior architecture, she applies industry experience to connect environmental psychology with the performance of the built environment.

Email: toktamkouklan@tamu.edu 

Research interests: Environmental Psychology, Human-Building Interaction (HBI) , Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ), Human-Centric Design  

Amir Hossein Oliaee is a PhD student at Texas A&M University, working with Dr. David Jeong and Dr. Ashrant Aryal. His current research focuses on enhancing transportation construction projects through AI, computer vision, and natural language processing. He holds an M.S. in Construction Management and a B.S. in Architectural Engineering. Amir is a Hagler Institute Student Fellow and the Supporting Administrator for the NSF-funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) at the TAMU Department of Construction.

Email: oliaee@tamu.com

Research interests: Data-driven construction management, Natural language Processing in AEC, Computer vision techniques, AI in construction

Rafay Ali is a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Engineering at Texas A&M University advised by Dr. David Jeong and Dr. Ashrant Aryal. He got his BS in Electrical Engineering from National University of Sciences and Technology(2019) and his Masters in Computer Engineering  from Texas A&M University(2024). His current research encompasses developing AI enabled digital twins for the process industry from design documentation to 3D modelling to process simulation.

Email: rhayat@tamu.edu

Research interests: Physics Informed Machine Learning, AI Agents, Vision-Language Models 

Sharjeel Anjum is a third-year PhD student co-supervised by Dr. Ashrant Aryal and Dr. Chumma Nnaji. He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science and a master’s degree in construction management. His doctoral research lies at the multidisciplinary intersection of computer science, construction, and safety, with a focus on worker health and safety, early detection of fatigue to prevent potential accidents, and improving productivity through reliable, generalizable, and deployable physiological machine learning (PML) approaches. He also conducts research on computer vision applications for monitoring and improving worker safety.

Email: muhammadanjum@tamu.edu

Research interests: Physiological Machine Learning, Worker Safety, Automation in Construction, Computer Vision, Virtual Reality (VR), Adversarial Machine Learning, and Applied AI