About

In the Thakor Lab, I helped lead the development of a non-invasive autonomic sensing system, from materials fabrication through signal analysis. I produced custom PEDOT:PSS sensors on flexible substrates for the auditory canal, performed 50+ rat and 15+ porcine surgeries, and built Python and MATLAB pipelines that detect R-peaks and measure heart-rate variability from in-ear sensors — matching the signal quality of clinical gold-standard electrodes.

That work grew into an independent project comparing focused ultrasound (FUS) with invasive vagus nerve stimulation for autonomic tone modulation. It started as a dead end — an IACUC amendment stalled past my summer window — but the detours converged on a real gap in the literature. That question is now the basis of my honors thesis, my most productive work, and a first-author publication. I've contributed to nine papers across Nature Biomedical Engineering, Scientific Reports, ASME, and others.

As co-founder and Chief Research Officer of Neuro Safety Systems, I built our research and development from nothing. I architect the machine-learning pipeline that classifies driver vigilance from in-ear EEG — producing a proprietary Vigilance Score that outperforms camera-based fatigue detection by 40% — and the on-device inference that triggers haptic feedback within milliseconds, all with encrypted, local processing.

I lead our IRB-approved human fatigue trials, our academic and trucking-industry partnerships, and a provisional patent on a DOT-compliant EEG headset. We've been selected for the Antler NYC Residency and the Hopkins Pava Center's Spark, Ignite, Fuel, and Blaze accelerators.

I'm a certified EMT-Basic and a volunteer with the Arbutus Volunteer Fire Department. I've responded to 70+ calls across lower-income Baltimore County neighborhoods — serving patients in homelessness, substance use, and mental-health crises — and I take part in Baltimore's Narcan leave-behind program, distributing naloxone at no cost.

Clinically, I've collected EEG data on spine-surgery patients to study postoperative delirium, and I've shadowed physicians across family medicine, neurocritical care, and spine surgery. The throughline is the same one I learned cleaning an ambulance with an EMS lieutenant who later mentored me through my certification: comfort is familiarity, and caring for people means showing up — often before anyone asks.

I co-founded and led the Iranian Cultural Society at Hopkins, growing it from four students in my dorm room into an organization with an executive board and partnerships across seven regional groups. Growing up Iranian-American, my identity often felt split between two worlds; advocating alongside my peers is where that distance collapsed.

Through ICS, I drive a volunteer corps every Saturday to Gandomak, an Iranian weekend school in Washington, DC — over an hour each way — where each of us pairs with a student to work through their classwork.

• I learned rugby from scratch and play starting wing for the Johns Hopkins Rugby Football Club.
• I returned to the piano on my own in college — the first song I relearned was Piano Man. These days I work through Studio Ghibli soundtracks and play Iranian pop songs by ear.
• I'm fluent in Farsi and English and conversational in French.

If you think I can be helpful to you or your work, or you'd just like to connect, feel free to get in touch.