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.

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.