Lab Director

I am an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of computing, economics and behavioral sciences, and systems engineering. I am a tenured associate professor in Northeastern University's College of Engineering, with affiliations at the Network Science Institute, Institute of Experiential AI, and School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs. I received my Ph.D. from UC Berkeley's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, with a minor in economics and management sciences, and a graduate certificate from Haas Business School. My undergraduate studies combined electrical engineering and chemistry at Sharif University.  Before becoming a faculty, I was working in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur and an RF/mm-wave chip designer.

My research focuses on computational modeling of complex sociotechnical systems to inform engineering design and policy interventions. I've applied this approach to diverse domains, including Human-AI integration and collective intelligence, platform systems, behavioral epidemic modeling and public health, organizational teamwork, system resilience, and systems engineering problems such as distributed satellite system architecture. My work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (including a CAREER award), DARPA, IARPA, and private corporations. I've published in general science journals as well as top-tier venues across systems engineering, public policy, economics, social sciences, electrical engineering, and computing. My research has been featured in media outlets such as Wired, the Boston Globe, and the New York Times.

In addition to my research, I am deeply committed to academic service. Since 2020, I have served as the program lead and director for the Engineering Management program at Northeastern. From 2020 to 2023, I was President of the Council of Engineering Systems Scholars and Universities (CESUN), a spin-off of MIT's Engineering Systems Division, which focuses on technical and policy design for complex sociotechnical systems. I also have been chairing the Scientific Advisory Committee of Future Resilient Systems since 2020, a large-scale 10-year joint initiative between ETH Zurich and the government of Singapore.