Affiliations: 

• Research Scientist - Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) - X Computational Physics Division, hosted at LANL Michigan SPARC. Affiliated also with LANL's Advanced Network Science Initiative (ANSI). 

• Research Scholar at Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering (MICDE) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

• Visiting Research Scientist at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Department at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Education: 

• Ph.D. ECE  - [Aug. 2018 to May 2023]:  University of Central Florida. Advisors:  Prof. George Atia and Prof. Wasfy Mikhael.

Research Experience & Positions: 

• [Jan. 2025 to Jan. 2026] Research Scientist - Systems Planning & Analysis, supporting the Information Innovative Office (I2O, recently changed to IPTO) at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

• [Jan. 2025 to Jan. 2026] Visiting scholar at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Department at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, hosted by Prof. Qing Qu at the DeepThink Lab, and at the Department of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering (CMSE) at Michigan State University, hosted by Prof. Saiprasad Ravishankar in the SLIM group. 

• [Jul. 2023 to Dec. 2024] Postdoctoral research associate at CMSE at Michigan State University, hosted by Prof. Saiprasad Ravishankar (CMSE & BME) in the SLIM group and Prof. Rongrong Wang (CMSE & Math), and in EECS at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, hosted by Prof. Qing Qu.

• [Sep. 2019 to Sep. 2022] Information Directorate at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). Hosted by Dr. Alvaro Velasquez. 

Research Interests: 

• Generative Models For Inverse Problems | Differentiable Approaches For Combinatorial Optimization | Robust Machine Learning. 

Honors & Awards: 

• NextProf Nexus 2026, hosted by Georgia Tech and in partnership with U-M and UC Berkeley.  

• CPAL25 Rising Stars Award, 2nd Conference on Parsimony and Learning (CPAL), hosted by Stanford University.

• Alumni Outstanding Research Award, 10th anniversary of the CMSE Department at Michigan State University. 

CV: 

• My CV can be found here (as of July 2026). 

Contact info: ismailal[at]umich[dot]edu