Selected Awards & Grants
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U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)
Title: Adaptive Zero-Trust Cybersecurity Architecture with AI-Driven Real-Time Threat Monitoring for U.S. Nuclear Plants
Role: Principal Investigator (PI)
Amount: $500,000
Duration: August 1, 2025 – July 31, 2028 -
IBM–Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute (IIDAI)
Title: Low-Rank Operator Substrates for Parametric Elliptic PDE Families: A Provably Amortized Complexity Reformulation
Role: Co-Principal Investigator (Co-PI)
Amount: $178,596
Duration: August 16, 2026 – August 15, 2028
Focus: AI-driven and quantum-enhanced operator-learning methods for accelerating complex scientific computations. -
National Science Foundation (NSF) – Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) / CISE CRII
Title: CRII: SaTC: A Framework to Defend Against Sockpuppet Connection Requests in Social Networks
Role: Sole Principal Investigator
Amount: $157,888
Duration: October 31, 2024 – March 31, 2027 -
Illinois Manufacturing Excellence Center (IMEC) / NIST
Title: RAPID: A Testbed for Experimenting with Industrial IoT and Cybersecurity Integration in Small Manufacturing
Role: Co-Principal Investigator
Amount: $99,102
Duration: June 1, 2022 – November 30, 2022 -
Computing Alliance of Hispanic-Serving Institutions (CAHSI LREU)
Title: NSF BPC-AE Research Experiences for Undergraduates (LREU) Project through CAHSI
Role: LREU Mentor
Total Amount: $15,000 ($10,000 in 2025; $5,000 in 2024)
Duration: October 6, 2025 – December 9, 2025; October 6, 2024 – December 9, 2024 -
Competitive Research & Conference Travel Awards
NSF NAIRR Pilot Expansion Conference (2026), AAAI ICWSM (2018), FIU GPSC (2018), FIU SCIS (2018), and ACM WebSci SIGWEB (2017).
Honors, Recognitions & Nominations
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UTEP Student Choice High Impact and Innovative Teaching (HIIT) Award (2025)
Student-selected university teaching award recognizing exceptional impact and innovation in education. -
UTEP Pioneering Researcher (2025)
Recognized for contributions to trustworthy and adversary-resilient AI and cybersecurity research. -
Rising Star Faculty Award (2024)
Nominated for outstanding early-career research and academic leadership. -
University-Level Early Career Faculty Excellence Award (2022, 2024)
Southern Illinois University (SIU) nomination recognizing excellence in research, teaching, and service. -
Scholar of the Year (2020)
PennWest nomination for outstanding scholarly contributions.
Additional Honors
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SCIS Best Graduate Student in Research (2018)
Florida International University, School of Computing and Information Sciences. -
Dissertation Year Fellowship (2018)
Florida International University. -
Dean’s Merit List Award (2013–2014)
Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET). -
Best Paper Award – ICEEICT (2014)
Awarded for conference paper presentation. -
President’s Rover Scout Award (2009–2014)
National recognition for leadership, service, and community engagement. -
Bangladesh Government Merit Scholarship (2006, 2008)
Awarded for ranking within the top 1% among approximately two million students nationwide.
