
Dr. Nidhal Carla Bouaynaya holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and an M.S. in Pure Mathematics from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a Professor of ECE and the Director of Rowan’s Artificial Intelligence Lab (RAIL). She is currently serving as the Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies of the Henry M. Rowan College of Engineering. Previously, she was a faculty member with the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
Her research interests are in Big Data Analytics, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Mathematical Optimization. She co-authored more than 100 refereed journal articles, book chapters and conference proceedings, such as IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Signal Processing Letters, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine and PLOS Medicine. Dr. Bouaynaya won numerous Best Paper Awards, the most recent was at the 2019 IEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing. She is also the winner of the Top algorithm at the 2016 Multinomial Brain Tumor Segmentation Challenge (BRATS). Dr. Bouaynaya has been honored with numerous research and teaching awards, including Rowan Research Achievement Award in 2017 and The University of Arkansas at Little Rock Faculty Excellence Award in Research.
Her research is primarily funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF CCF, NSF ACI, NSF DUE, NSF I-Corps, NSF ECCS, NSF OAC and NSF HRD), The National Institutes of Health (NIH), US. Department of Education (USED), New Jersey Department of Transportation (NJ DoT), US. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Lockheed Martin Inc. and other industry. She is also interested in entrepreneurial endeavors. In 2017, she Co-founded and is Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of MRIMATH, LLC, a start-up company that uses artificial intelligence to improve patient oncology outcome and treatment response. MRIMath is funded by the NIH SBIR Program.