NextG Wireless Team 

Nesrine Cherif received her PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada in October 2022. She worked under the supervision of Professor Abbas Yongacoglu (University of Ottawa) and Professor Halim Yanikomeroglu (Carleton's University). Prior to that, she obtained her Master's degree in Telecommunications from Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS), Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in August 2017 and her Bachelor's degree from Sup'Com, Tunis, Tunisia, in September 2014. She was with Dell Technologies as full-time 5G NR L1 Developer from December 2021 to August 2024. Since September 2024, she joined NYUAD as a Postdoctoral Associate with Prof. Qurrat-Ul-Ain Nadeem. Her research interests include developing and investigating new architectures, mainly terrestrial, to provide reliable cellular connectivity for UAVs by leveraging various tools including stochastic geometry, convex optimization, and reinforcement learning.

Vaibhav Kumar received his Ph.D. degree in electronic engineering from University College Dublin, Ireland, in 2020. He is currently a Postdoctoral Associate at New York University Abu Dhabi, UAE. Before this, from 2012 to 2013, he worked as a Lecturer at the National Institute of Technology Raipur, India. Between 2015 and 2016, he served as a Project Associate for the “Mobile Broadband Service Support over Cognitive Radio Networks” project, funded by Media Lab Asia, Government of India. He was a visiting Ph.D. student at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi from January to May 2019 under the Erasmus+ ICM research program. From September to December 2020, he held the position of Adjunct Lecturer at Beijing-Dublin International College. He also worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University College Dublin from April 2020 to August 2023. He is a co-recipient of the Best Paper Award at IEEE GLOBECOM 2021 and was awarded the Exemplary Reviewer Certificate by IEEE Communications Letters in 2022. His research interests include integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS), physical layer security, next-generation multiple access techniques, mobile edge computing, and the application of convex optimization for resource allocation in beyond 5G (B5G) networks 

Yongqiang Zhang received the B.Sc. degree in communication engineering from Southwest University, Chongqing, China, in 2019, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Thuwal, Saudi Arabia, in 2021 and 2025, respectively. His research focuses on leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) for the design and optimization of MIMO communication systems.

Khalil Allouch is a Global PhD Fellow in Electrical and Computer Engineering at NYU Tandon School of Engineering (August 2024–present), conducting research in wireless communications under the supervision of Prof. Qurrat-Ul Ain Nadeem. He earned his master’s degree from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in 2024, supervised by Prof. Mohamed Slim Alouini. Prior to his graduate studies, Khalil completed his multidisciplinary engineering diploma with first-class honors at the École Polytechnique de Tunisie in 2022. His research interests include wireless communication systems, optimization, non-terrestrial networks and MIMO.