About

I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Washington State University, advised by Prof. Mohamed Elmahallawy. My research focuses on privacy-preserving machine learning, federated learning, and large language models (LLMs), with an emphasis on secure and efficient learning and adaptation in distributed systems.

I work at the intersection of machine learning, cybersecurity, and trustworthy AI, with particular interest in protecting sensitive data while preserving model utility in deployment settings such as healthcare and finance. I am motivated by scalable, practical frameworks for secure collaborative learning under real-world privacy, robustness, and operational constraints.

News

• April 2026 — Our paper SecureGate: Learning When to Reveal PII Safely via Token-Gated Dual-Adapters for Federated LLMs was accepted to the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026). The work introduces a privacy-aware federated fine-tuning framework for LLMs with dual-adapter LoRA and token-level gating; preprint on arXiv.
• April 2025 — Received the Best Graduate Research Project Award at the Showcase of Research and Creative Activities, Washington State University.

Research experience

Research Assistant, Washington State University (2025–present)

• Conduct research in machine learning with a focus on large language models, privacy, and security.
• Review and synthesize literature to identify research gaps, risks, and promising directions.
• Develop research ideas, experimental pipelines, and technical foundations through coursework and project-based work.

Mentoring experience

Graduate Research Mentor, CySER Program (DoD VICEROY Initiative) — Spring 2025

• Mentored undergraduate students on security and trustworthiness of machine learning systems.
• Guided projects within a federally funded cybersecurity research program and supported research outputs.

Undergraduate Research Mentor, Chancellor’s Summer Scholar Program (WSU) — Summer 2025

• Supervised an undergraduate research project from planning through final presentation.
• Supported methodology, experimentation, and clear communication of results.

Udacity Nanodegree Mentor — 2017–2018

• Mentored students in Android development; provided one-on-one feedback and technical support.

For a full list of publications and experience, see my publications and CV pages.