Mahdavifar’s Zoom Group Meeting, Summer 2021

Post-Doctoral Researchers

Fariba Abbasi (2021 – )

Fariba received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Tabriz, Tabriz, Iran, and the Ph.D. degree under the supervision of Prof. Emanuele Viterbo in the Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering (ECSE) at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. She worked as a junior research assistant in Information Systems and Security Lab (ISSL) at Sharif University of Technology (SUT) from 2014 to 2015, and worked in Institute of Network Coding (INC) at Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) from 2015 to 2016. She received several awards and honors, including two visiting scholar’s fellowships from the Institute of Network Coding (INC) and Department of Information Engineering at Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in 2015 and 2016, respectively, Monash International Postgraduate Research Scholarship (MIPRS) and Monash Graduate Scholarship (MGS) in 2017 and Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Project Top-Up Scholarship in 2018. Her research interests broadly lie in coding and information theory and machine learning with applications in telecommunications.

PhD students

Chin-Jen (James) Pang (2017 – )

James received the B.S.Eng. degree in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University in 2016. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, University of Michigan, jointly advised by Hessam Mahdavifar and S. Sandeep Pradhan. His research interests include information theory, coding theory, and quantum error correction.

Talha Akyildiz (2020 – )

Talha received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical and electronics engineering from Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey, in 2017 and 2020, respectively. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA. His research interests include the general area of wireless communications, with an emphasis on channel coding, deep learning, and 5G and beyond.

Utkarsh Gupta (2021 – )

Utkarsh received his Bachelors in Mathematics and Computing from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi in 2021. He represented India at the Asia Pacific Mathematical Olympiad 2016 securing the Honourable Mention Award, and was an awardee at the Indian National Mathematical Olympiad 2015. His primary research interests are in the mathematical foundations of coding and information theory and their applications to wireless communications and data storage.

Hsuan-Po Liu (2021 – )

Hsuan-Po received his B.Sc. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering and M.Sc. degree in Communications Engineering from the National Chiao Tung University (NCTU), Taiwan, in 2018 and 2019. He was a recipient of the Outstanding Graduate Student Thesis Award from the Chinese Institute of Electrical Engineering in 2019. Furthermore, he received the Outstanding Academic Achievement Award from NCTU in 2020. His research interest includes communication system design and deep learning.

Samin Riasat (2021 – )

Samin received his Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 2013. He completed his Master of Mathematics (MMath) in Pure Mathematics from the University of Waterloo in 2015, and then a Master of Mathematics (MMath) in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo in 2019. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, jointly under Mahdi Cheraghchi and Hessam Mahdavifar, with a focus on coding theory and its applications.