Story

I have spent most of my working life around systems and networks. The fascination started young. The way a handful of routers, switches, and protocols can quietly tie together cities and countries always felt like one of the more honest kinds of magic to me, and it never really wore off.

After my undergraduate degree at NUST in Islamabad, I joined Pakistan’s National Telecom Corporation. Six years there taught me something the textbooks could not. I planned, deployed, and troubleshot DSLAMs, BRAS, switches, and routers across the country, and I spent a lot of time on the phone with customers when those networks failed. People would describe what their day was like without internet. Kids who could not finish their homework. A small business that could not process payments. A relative they could not video-call. What struck me hardest was not that connectivity mattered, but that it mattered everywhere I went, and the places where it broke down most often were the rural ones. The towns where my own friends and family lived.

That is the part I carried into the PhD. I came to Iowa State to work on the things that determine whether a wireless network can survive in the kinds of places that have always been treated as edge cases: long distances, sparse infrastructure, fewer engineers within driving distance, real users who have nowhere else to go for service. The ARA Wireless Living Lab gave me a place to actually build that, at scale, in the field. ACCoRD and ArMORED are the next chapters. Making Open RAN multi-vendor deployments real, and making the radios that drive them efficient enough to put almost anywhere.

The number that keeps me oriented is roughly three billion. That is the scale of the global population still without meaningful internet access in 2026. The AI era is going to widen that gap before it narrows it, unless someone is doing the unglamorous work of running fiber, putting up radios, and verifying that the systems we ship actually hold up where the spreadsheets say they should. I would like to be part of that work for as long as it takes.

Outside research I am usually in the garden, on a cricket or badminton field, or with my family. Those three are not unrelated to the rest of this. They are how I keep the rest of it from taking up all the air.

If any of this resonates with the work you do, I would be glad to hear from you. The contact links on the home page all reach me.