About me
I am a senior AI research and engineering leader with 15+ years of experience designing, scaling, and deploying large-scale AI systems across applied research and enterprise production. At IBM Research, I progressed from researcher to senior technical and program leadership roles, leading high-impact initiatives at the intersection of large language models, reasoning, planning, and agentic systems.
I am currently based at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, New York, where I serve as Technical Lead for LLM Reasoning & Agentic Systems. My work focuses on production-grade, multi-step reasoning and tool-augmented LLM workflows, directly powering the Granite model family and next-generation capabilities within watsonx, delivering measurable gains in reasoning accuracy, task success, and enterprise adoption.
Previously, I served as Program Director for IBM’s Neuro-Symbolic AI program, leading a global research effort spanning 50+ researchers across multiple continents. In this role, I defined long-term technical strategy for hybrid neural-symbolic reasoning, reinforcement learning, and decision-making systems, while building and scaling a global research community of over 6,000 members.
My research output includes 20+ U.S. patents and 80+ peer-reviewed publications, with multiple best paper awards. I am a frequent keynote and invited speaker at international conferences and industry venues, and have delivered 50+ talks worldwide. I also serve as Jack W. Thompson, M.D. Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan–Flint.
Beyond IBM, I serve on advisory and executive boards, including Executive Board Member at Centaur AI (USA) and Scientific & Industrial Advisory Board Member at the National Center of Artificial Intelligence (NCAI), Pakistan.
My mission is to build trustworthy, scalable, and future-ready AI systems that translate rigorous research into real-world impact. I welcome collaboration with researchers, industry leaders, and institutions shaping the next frontier of AI.
Management & Leadership
- AI Strategy, Vision & Roadmapping
- Program & Portfolio Leadership
- Cross-Functional Team Management (up to 50+ researchers)
- Research-to-Production Execution
- Hiring, Mentoring & Talent Development
- Stakeholder & Executive Engagement
- Advisory & Board Leadership
- Keynote Speaking & Thought Leadership
Technical Expertise (Hands-on)
- Large Language Models (LLMs)
- Multi-step Reasoning, Planning & Agentic Systems
- Tool-augmented & API-driven LLMs
- Synthetic Data Generation & RL-based Optimization
- LLM Evaluation, Benchmarking & Robustness
- Neuro-Symbolic AI
- Distributed & GPU-Accelerated AI Systems
- NLP, Computer Vision & Robotics