Mohammed Benzaouia
School - SSE Employment Status - Full-Time Office - Building 8B, Office 210 Office hours - Monday, Wednesday, & Friday 9:00 - 10:00, 12:00 - 14:00 Office extension -
I am currently an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at AUI. I was previously a postdoctoral research scholar at Stanford, working with Prof. Shanhui Fan. I completed my PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT, working with Prof. Steven Johnson on various problems related to wave-matter interactions. Prior to joining MIT, I graduated from Ecole Polytechnique in France majoring in Physics and Applied Mathematics after completing two years of Classes Preparatoires in Morocco. During my PhD, I was part of the Electrical Engineering department, my advisor was in the Mathematics department and my office was in the Physics building. This really highlights my interest in interdisciplinary work and exploring new ideas in different fields. For example, in a work on metaparticle arrays, we were inspired by some established results in solar-cell design in order to solve a problem of ocean buoys and optimize energy extraction from ocean waves! Broadly speaking, I'm interested in exploring novel physical effects occurring in general wave scattering systems, especially in photonics. One of the key applications to be explored is passive radiative cooling, which allows cooling of structures by designing materials’ optical properties. Since my work mostly involves analytical and numerical modeling, another direction to look at relates to opportunities offered by physics-informed machine learning. Of course, that doesn’t mean just throwing AI tools at random problems which may be easily solved with the usual gradient descent, but rather looking at which problems can the tools of statistical learning provide new insights.