About

My interests keep sprawling past whatever boundary I try to draw around them, which I've come to see as a feature, not a flaw. I enjoy solving a mathematical optimisation problem and writing out a lemma as much as I enjoy pushing a system to its experimental limits, or building software and hardware that actually works at scale.

My PhD and postdoc lived largely in that first, experimental world: proving things, testing them, seeing where the theory holds and where it breaks. The years since have been about building from the ground up: production systems, security infrastructure, things people actually run. Maybe because of that range, I get real satisfaction from working alongside people whose expertise sits nowhere near mine, and learning enough of their world to actually understand the problem we're solving together.

Experience

  • Engineering Manager, Security at Tucows Inc (2025 – present)

    • Leading the engineering team and cross-functional SDLC security initiatives, while remaining hands-on with backend security and DNS abuse mitigation. Applying AI-driven tooling to strengthen security operations and SDLC workflows.

  • Software Engineer: Back-end & Security at Tucows Inc (2020 – 2025)

    • Built abuse-detection and security tooling for large-scale networked systems (Go, Perl, Lua, Bash); designed REST APIs and a micro-service observability platform (Grafana, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ). Represented Tucows in ICANN's CPH/TechOps working group.

  • Software Consultant: DevOps at Chebucto Community Net (2020)

    • Modernised two-decade-old infrastructure for a volunteer-run community network, migrating ~600 user accounts to new services.

  • Co-Founder & Tech Lead at Wavelite / Haila Technologies (2017 – 2019)

    • See Miscellaneous below for more on this venture-backed IoT startup.

  • Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT CSAIL (2016 – 2017)

  • Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin (2015 – 2016)

  • PhD Research Fellow at Nokia Bell Labs (2012 – 2015)

  • Engineer at Oclaro Inc (now Lumentum), Paignton, UK (2010 – 2012)

    • See Selected Work for publications from this period.

    Optimization

  • Recommending access points to individual mobile users via automatic group learning. Collaboration with Prof Doug Leith (TCD) and Alex Checco (Sheffield University)

  • Utility Fair Rate Allocation in 802.11/LTE Networks. Collaboration with Prof Doug Leith (TCD)

  • PhD Thesis

  • Utility Fair RAT Selection in Multi-Homed LTE/802.11 Networks. Collaboration with Prof Doug Leith (TCD)

  • Dynamic idle mode control in small cell networks. Collaboration with Prof Doug Leith (TCD), Rouzbeh Razavi (Kent State University), Holger Claussen (Bell Labs,Nokia)

  • Energy-aware configuration of small cell networks. Collaboration with Prof Doug Leith (TCD), Rouzbeh Razavi (Kent State University) Android code for mobility measurements

  • Tilt angle adaptation in LTE networks with advanced interference mitigation. Collaboration with Prof Doug Leith (TCD), Rouzbeh Razavi (Kent State University)

  • Utility fair optimization of antenna tilt angles in LTE networks Collaboration with Prof Doug Leith (TCD), Rouzbeh Razavi (Kent State University)

    • Design and Evaluation

  • Chorus: truly distributed distributed-MIMO. Collaboration with Haraharian Rahul (CSAIL, MIT) and Ezzeldin Hamed (Microsoft Research)

  • Real-time cloud robotics in practical smart city applications. Collaboration with Nazli Khan Beigi (McGill) and Soodeh Farokhi (C2RO Cloud Robatics)

  • Experimental evaluation of multi-path schedulers for LTE/Wi-Fi devices. Collaboration with Prof Doug Leith (TCD). code for measurements , scheduling code

  • Development of a high speed wideband frequency tunable infra-red laser source for real-time wind turbine array sensing applications. Collaboration with Philip Mitchel and Adrian Janssen (Oclaro)

  • Channel adaptive video stream switching for broadband wireless links. Collaboration with Martin fleury and Mohamed Ghanbari (University of Essex)

  • Adaptive video stream switching for an IEEE 802.16 channel. Collaboration with Martin fleury and Mohamed Ghanbari (University of Essex)

    • Miscellaneous

    I contributed to the launch of a startup, Wavelite (Recently known as HaiLa) in Montreal between March 2017- May 2019. HaiLa is a hardware/software IoT solution that aims at enabling scalable and sustainable development of IoT sensors. The technology addresses the key challenge with limited life time of wireless sensors.

    I worked as the technical lead, contributed towards building functional prototypes, technology roadmap creation, recruiting, and steering the software and hardware development. As a result of our work, we filed a number of provisional patents under "SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR PASSIVE WIRELESS DEVICES", in addition to the external patents that were licesnsed through university collaborations.

  • http://www.montrealintechnology.com/wavelite-receives-the-2018-ces-eureka-park-climate-change-award/=3230578

  • https://www.rfidjournal.com/articles/view?17653

    • Alongside the startup, I founded the first Canadian chapter of Women of MENA in Tech in Montreal, profiled here:

  • Why Are There So Many Persian Women in Technology?, URelles Magazine, on founding the Montreal chapter

    • Talks & Writing

  • A Hitchhiker's Guide to Using & Securing AI, a recap of OWASP AppSec Italy, June 2026: secure coding with AI, agentic security, guardrails, prompt injection, and trustworthy CI/CD.

  • Presentation at Microsoft Research, Cambridge

  • LTE Listener. Work at MIT Senseable City Lab

  • Wavelite White Paper: Impact of the Technology on Sustainability

  • Alex Hanna: Diversity, the Key Towards Ethical Design, an interview, URelles Magazine

  • Fereshteh Forough: A Real Superhero for Real People, an interview, URelles Magazine

  • Linda Liukas: A Programmer, a Storyteller and an Illustrator, an interview, URelles Magazine

    • Music

    Self-similarity in Music: coming soon

    Community

    Contact