Lab Members

Meet the members of our research team.

Marwa Chafii, Lab Director

Marwa Chafii received her Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering in 2016, and her Master’s degree in the field of advanced wireless communication systems (SAR) in 2013, both from CentraleSupélec, France. Between 2014 and 2016, she has been a visiting researcher at Poznan University of Technology (Poland), University of York (UK), Yokohama National University (Japan), and University of Oxford (UK). She joined the Technical University of Dresden, Germany, in 2018 as a research group leader, and ENSEA, France, in 2019 as an associate professor where she held a Chair of Excellence on Artificial Intelligence from CY Initiative. Since September 2021, she has been an associate professor at New York University (NYU) Abu Dhabi, and NYU WIRELESS, NYU Tandon School of Engineering. Her research interests include advanced waveform design, machine learning for wireless communications, and indoor localization.

She received the prize of the best Ph.D. in France in the fields of Signal, Image & Vision, and she has been nominated in the top 10 Rising Stars in Computer Networking and Communications by N2Women in 2020. She served as Associate Editor at IEEE Communications Letters 2019-2021, where she received the Best Editor Award in 2020. Between 2018 and 2021, she was the research lead at the Women in AI organization. She is currently Associate Editor at IEEE Transactions on Communications, serving as vice-chair of the IEEE ComSoc ETI on Machine Learning for Communications and leading the Education working group of the IEEE ComSoc ETI on Integrated Sensing and Communications.

Ahmad Bazzi, Research Scientist

Ahmad Bazzi was born in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. He received his PhD degree in electrical engineering from EURECOM, Sophia Antipolis, France, in 2017, and the MSc degree (summa cum laude) in wireless communication systems (SAR) from Centrale Supélec, in 2014. He is currently a Research Scientist at the Wireless Research Lab at New York University (NYU) Abu Dhabi, and NYU WIRELESS, NYU Tandon School of Engineering, contributing to integrated sensing and communications (ISAC). Prior to that, he was the Algorithm and Signal Processing Team Leader at CEVA-DSP, Sophia Antipolis, leading the work on Wi-Fi (802.11ax) and Bluetooth (5.xx BR/BLE/BTDM/LR) high-performant (HP) PHY modems, OFDMA MAC schedulers, and RF-related issues. He is an inventor with several patents involving intellectual property of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth products, all of which have been implemented and sold to key clients.

Since 2018, he has been publishing lectures on the YouTube platform under his name “Ahmad Bazzi”, where his channel contains mathematical, algorithmic, and programming topics, with 300,000 subscribers and more than 17 million views, as of September 2024. He was awarded a CIFRE Scholarship from Association Nationale Recherche Technologies (ANRT) France, in 2014, in collaboration with RivieraWaves (now CEVA-DSP). He was nominated for Best Student Paper Award at IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2016. He received the Silver Plate Creator Award from YouTube, in 2022, for his 100,000 subscriber milestone. He was awarded an exemplary reviewer for the IEEE Transactions on Communications in 2022 and an exemplary reviewer for the IEEE Wireless Communications Letters in 2022. He served as technical program committee (TPC) member and a reviewer for many leading international conferences. He was selected amongst top 200 Top Arab creators for 2023. His research interests include signal processing, wireless communications, statistics, and optimization.

Roberto Bomfin, Post-Doctoral Associate

Roberto Bomfin received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering in 2021 from the Technische Universität Dresden (TUD), Germany, and his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Instituto Nacional de Telecomunicações (INATEL), Brazil, in 2014 and 2016, respectively. In 2014, he worked as a researcher for the Brazilian undergraduate research program, on the topic of spectrum sensing for cognitive radio networks. From 2017 to 2022 he worked on the H2020 European projects ORCA, iNGENIOUS, and Hexa-X, with proof of concept implementation of wireless communications systems on software-defined radio (SDR). His research interests include spreading waveforms and receiver design for systems under doubly selective channels, and integrated sensing and communications (ISAC).

Vaibhav Kumar, Post-Doctoral Associate

Vaibhav Kumar received a B.E. degree in electronics and telecommunications engineering from CSVTU India, in 2012, the M.Tech. degree in electronics and communications engineering from The LNM Institute of Information Technology Jaipur, India, in 2015, and the Ph.D. degree in electronic engineering from University College Dublin, Ireland, in 2020.

Between 2012 and 2013, he worked as a Lecturer at the Department of Biomedical Engineering, National Institute of Technology Raipur, India. From 2015 to 2016, he served as a Project Associate on the “Mobile broadband service support over cognitive radio networks” project, funded by Media Lab Asia, Government of India. From January 2019 to May 2019, he was a Visiting Ph.D. at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi under the Erasmus+ ICM research program. Subsequently, from September 2020 to December 2020, he held the position of Adjunct Lecturer at Beijing-Dublin International College. From April 2020 until August 2023, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University College Dublin. He joined the NYUAD as a Postdoctoral Associate in September 2023. He is a co-recipient of the Best Paper Award at IEEE GLOBECOM 2021, and the Exemplary Reviewer Certificate by IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS in 2022. He is an Area Editor for Physical Communication (Elsevier). He served as a TPC member for IEEE ANTS 2022, IEEE ANTS 2023, and IEEE WCNC 2024. His research interests include integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), physical layer security, next-generation multiple access techniques, mobile edge computing, and the application of convex optimization for resource allocation in B5G networks.

Salmane Naoumi, PhD Student/Graduate Research Assistant

I am a PhD student at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering, where my research focuses on exploring the use of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning and emergent communication in the field of Wireless communications. I have a MSc from Ecole Centrale de Lille, France, and have also obtained Master’s degrees in Applied Mathematics and Machine Learning from Université de Lille 1 and Université Paris-Saclay, France.

Akhileswar Chowdary Gaddam, PhD Student/Graduate Research Assistant

He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Tandon School of Engineering, New York University, Brooklyn, under the guidance of Prof. Marwa Chafii. He is working in the area of joint sensing and communications for 6G. He completed his undergraduate in 2019 from Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology Bhopal (NIT Bhopal) with a major in Electronics and Communication Engineering. After his bachelor’s, he joined a 3-year (2019-2022) research-based Master’s degree with a major in Electrical Engineering, specializing in communication and signal processing at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IIT Hyderabad). In addition, he worked as a visiting student researcher at the University of Agder, Grimstad, Norway, from March 2021 to December 2021.

Dexin (Oscar) Wang, PhD Student / Graduate Research Assistant

Dexin Oscar Wang is currently an Electrical Engineering undergraduate student at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) and an undergraduate research assistant at its Wireless Lab. He is working on integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) for 6G. His current research interest focuses on target localization, including both detection and estimation, through reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS)-enabled passive radars (PR), as well as the channel optimization of such systems. During his undergraduate studies, he spent his spring 2023 semester at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, where he participated in course activities offered by NYU Wireless, including Communication Theory and Communication Networks. In addition, he worked on a project simulating localization through ultra-wideband (UWB) devices in a warehouse environment in the summer of 2022.

Kundai Mutuwira is an undergraduate Electrical Engineering student at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) and works as an undergraduate research assistant at the NYUAD Wireless Research Lab. Her research focuses on integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) for 6G, specifically on algorithms designed to solve the sensing estimation problem in bistatic configurations within communication-centric ISAC. She is exploring innovative deep-learning techniques that balance computational complexity and performance efficiency for estimation models. During her undergraduate studies, Kundai spent the Spring 2023 semester at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, where she engaged in course activities offered by NYU Wireless, including Communication Theory. She has also contributed to various multidisciplinary projects, such as developing a tremor detector system for Parkinson’s patients and working on image processing using Lloyd-Max quantization.

---

Ainara Kazymova is an undergraduate student in Electrical Engineering at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD). Her research, under the supervision of Prof. Marwa Chafii, focuses on beamforming optimization for physical layer security in reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) using convex optimization tools. She spent her third year of undergraduate studies at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, where her coursework included Communication Theory, Electronics, and Vertically Integrated Projects focused on electrical engineering and the future of coding with AI. She aims to pursue graduate studies in a field related to her current interests.

Alumni

• Dr. Konpal Ali, Post-doctoral associate (March 2022 – December 2023)

• Malak Ibrahim Mohamed Mohamed Mansour, Undergraduate student (Fall 2023)
  
  

• Obed Atsu, Undergrad research assistant (Spring 2024 – Summer 2024)