Meet Our Research Team
Our dedicated team of undergraduate and graduate students is working alongside faculty to advance the field of Educational Artificial Intelligence, creating innovative solutions that enhance learning experiences for students worldwide.

Dr. Abdallah Mohamed
Biography
Professor Abdallah Mohamed's expertise spans software engineering, decision support systems, and creative higher education. His research integrates optimization techniques, expert systems, and component-based software development to enhance decision-making in complex, uncertain, and dynamic environments. Beyond technical research, he is committed to advancing innovation in teaching and learning, developing new methodologies to foster creativity, engagement, and personalized learning experiences.
Contribution
Directs AI research, managing model selection and experiments with students to optimize LLM and RAG performance for EduAI.
Tech Stack

Dr. Mostafa Mohamed
Biography
Professor Mostafa Mohamed, previously an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering and now a Computer Science Professor at UBCO, advances research in AI, machine learning, and medical imaging. His notable contributions include white blood cell segmentation, leukemia detection, deep learning–based scene analysis, and human cell classification. With 500+ citations and more than a dozen publications at IEEE, he integrates hardware acceleration, parallel computing, and cloud systems to enhance healthcare diagnostics.
Contribution
Leads backend development and guides students in building scalable AI infrastructure using LLMs and RAG pipelines for EduAI.
Tech Stack

Dr. Fatemeh Fard
Biography
Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Data Science at UBC Okanagan, leading the FARD Lab (Foundational AIware Research and Development). Her research focuses on AI-driven software engineering, large language models for code, and NLP applications in low-resource programming languages.
Contribution
Leads research on adapter-based fine-tuning for low-resource programming languages, exploring transfer learning techniques to improve code intelligence. She has published extensively on code summarization, code clone detection, and the intersection of AI and software development.
Tech Stack

Dr. Ramon Lawrence
Biography
Professor and Department Head of Computer Science and Data Science at UBC Okanagan. His research spans database systems, data integration, and sensor/IoT data management. He is also the founder of Unity Data Inc., the developer of UnityJDBC—a system that enables SQL queries across heterogeneous data sources.
Contribution
Directed the Distributed Database Lab, advanced query optimization algorithms, and developed the UnityJDBC driver integrating relational and NoSQL data. His work bridges academic research and industry by providing scalable database solutions and mentoring numerous software engineering students.
Tech Stack

Ronit Buti
Biography
Ronit is an Honours Computer Science student who built EduAI, including a provider-agnostic model registry and a pgvector-backed retrieval layer that grounds answers in uploaded course materials.
Contribution
Led full-stack development of the platform including auth, UI, backend, and RAG pipeline, while architecting extensible tool interfaces for web search and document retrieval.
Tech Stack

Stavan Shah
Biography
Stavan is an Honours Computer Science student specializing in AI-driven software engineering and RAG systems. He previously worked on Courseplanner, a course advising chatbot for UBC, and an automated configuration agent. His current research focuses on 'Supervisory AI' architectures, designing multi-agent systems where a secondary model validates pedagogical feedback to ensure accuracy and educational value.
Contribution
Manages the backend API and database architecture. He ensures that all server-side operations are secure, scalable, and properly integrated with the application's data models.
Tech Stack
Ahab Masud Siddiqui
Biography
As a junior in Computer Science and Data science at UBC and a International Undergraduate Research Award recipient (IURA), I've accumulated strong skills in software development. Specific experience lies within building full-stack web applications and AI/ML projects. I've worked under the supervision of multiple professors developing EduAI and Hospital Wayfinding mobile application using Swift and Flutter. I'm eager to contribute to EduAI and collaborate with a passionate research team.
Contribution
Made system design, architecture, and accessibility-focused UI decisions for an ADHD-assistive AI chatbot, alongside full-stack development on the EduAI platform.
Tech Stack

Necmi Kaan Sapoglu
Biography
An undergraduate from Turkey with a great interest in AI used in education, as well as a personal interest in video game development. In the EduAI project, he helps develop the backend infrastructure, developing the database, and handling API calls.
Contribution
Developed backend infrastructure, managed databases, and implemented API integrations, while exploring applications of AI in education and maintaining a strong personal interest in video game development.
Tech Stack

Ribhav Sharma
Biography
Ribhav Sharma is a 4th-year Computer Science student who has demonstrated a strong aptitude for AI and software development. He contributed to the EduAI project, focusing on enhancing the platform's learning capabilities and user-interaction framework. Ribhav brings a blend of academic rigor and hands-on development experience, making him an asset in building innovative tech solutions.
Contribution
Contributed to EduAI: improved core learning algorithms and enhanced user-interaction systems.
Tech Stack

Leila Saparbek
Biography
Fourth-year Computer Science and Data Science student at UBC Okanagan. Interested in backend development, data pipelines, and applying machine learning to solve real-world problems.
Contribution
Volunteer Research Assistant contributing to backend infrastructure development and data architecture design. Responsible for implementing API endpoints and database integration, with a focus on designing efficient data pipelines that ensure seamless information flow throughout the system using React Router 7 and PostgreSQL.
Tech Stack

Mohamed Gamal Sakr
Biography
Mohamed Gamal Sakr is an honours Computer Science student at UBC Okanagan specializing in agentic AI and machine learning. He has industry experience from a software engineering internship at Allianz and currently develops LLM-based code vulnerability tools at UBCO. As a student leader and former president-elect of the Computer Science Course Union, he has earned the Dean's List (2025) and UBC's Outstanding International Student Award (2022). His project excellence was recognized with the Database Web Development Badge (2024). He also holds professional certifications from Stanford and Harvard, focusing on applying advanced AI research to practical, real-world systems.
Contribution
Lead AI Engineer & Project Manager who integrated a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) engine and production-grade vector database into the core platform while also directing the project lifecycle — from planning and technical design to task management and team coordination — ensuring timely delivery and alignment between engineering, research, and product stakeholders.
Tech Stack

Syed Saad Ali
Biography
Syed Saad Ali is a fourth year computer science student who created the question maker project, dedicated towards assisting professors in creating assessment variations to in their respective courses. He is currently working on a research project for adaptive AI model routing, dedicated towards routing AI prompts to appropriate AI models to optimize educational value and energy use. He is keen on exploring how computer science can improve sustainable impact through well designed systems.
Contribution
Full stack development on Question Maker (Deployment, apis, tests, database, UI, components).
Tech Stack

Abdullah Mohsin Naqvi
Biography
Abdullah is a third-year Computer Science Co-op student at UBC Okanagan focused on backend and infrastructure. He built a Redis-compatible key-value store from scratch in C11 hitting over 1.3M RPS on SET/GET, and a React-based therapy booking platform that's been live in production for over a year. He recently wrapped a backend internship at Systems Limited working on cache invalidation and rate limiting, and writes about his projects at naqvi.dev.
Contribution
Worked on the core platform development and implemented backend architecture and system design features to enhance user experience on EduAI.
