Grants and Awards
An overview of externally funded research grants, academic honors, and scholarly recognitions reflecting contributions to Advanced AI, federated learning, multimodal LLMs and cybersecurity.
Research Grants
💡 NSF CISE CRII Grant | $167,500 | Sole PI
Awarded the prestigious National Science Foundation CISE Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) grant supporting foundational research in distributed and robust AI systems.
Project Title:
CRII: RI: Federated Meta-Learning for Cross-Network Crime Analytics in Interdependent Environments
📚 Publications from this Grant
🚀 NSF NAIRR Pilot Grant | Sole PI
Awarded the NSF National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot grant for the project:
“ARMOR-HAL: Unified Defense for Adversarial Robustness and Hallucination Mitigation in Large Vision-Language Models.”
This project advances secure and dependable AI systems through unified defense frameworks for large vision language models.
View Project DetailsNSF CISE REU Student Funding Award
Supported by the NSF CISE Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program through the Computing Research Association (CRA).
Summer Research Opportunity: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for Context-Aware Scene Understanding
This opportunity includes mentorship, a competitive NSF-supported stipend, and support for conference travel to present your work.
Full details are in the flyer below. Please feel free to share with students who may be interested.
Learn More & Apply🌟 ORAU Research Innovation Partnership Grant | Lead PI
Received the ORAU Research Innovation Partnership Grant as Lead PI for my proposal, titled "Large Language Models (LLM) Nexus: Bridging Technical Innovation and Ethical Horizons".
Funded by Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU), this program supports innovative initiatives that foster interdisciplinary collaboration among university members and domain experts.
View Details🛡️ DHS CINA Grant | Collaboration with FIU | SIU PI
Awarded a competitive grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under the Criminal Investigations and Network Analysis Center (CINA) program.
This project supported research and education at the intersection of artificial intelligence, public safety, and criminal activity recognition.
Academic Honors & Distinctions
🏆 Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award | 2024
Recipient of the Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award from the School of Computing at Southern Illinois University, recognizing excellence in teaching, mentorship, and curriculum development.
🎓 FIU 2022 Real Triumphs Graduate Award
Recipient of the prestigious 2022 Real Triumphs Graduate Award from Florida International University.
Each commencement, FIU recognizes a select group of graduates whose academic excellence, perseverance, and future promise distinguish them among their peers.
Watch Recognition VideoView Award Details
🏅 University-Wide Outstanding Master’s Degree Graduate Award
Recipient of the University-Wide Outstanding Master’s Degree Graduate Award, presented to one master’s graduate in recognition of exceptional academic achievement, impactful research contributions, and dedicated service.
📄 Best Paper Award | CSCI 2019
Received the Best Paper Award at CSCI 2019 for research on distributed IoT sensing and federated learning, with a focus on scalable and privacy-preserving distributed learning frameworks.