Selected work
Built, deployed, and operated by the AI/ML Unit at Askari Bank. Code we own. Models we can inspect. Infrastructure we run.
Sep 2024 – Present
VP & Unit Head — AI & Machine Learning · Oct 2025 – Present
Senior Data Scientist · Sep 2024 – Oct 2025
A small in-house team I built and lead. Code we own, models we can inspect, infrastructure we run ourselves. Live deployments from this run:
voice banking for the mobile app
Voice-driven fund transfers, balance inquiries, bill payments, and statements. English and Urdu. Built in-house on FastAPI, Whisper, FunctionGemma, and Docker. Built proprietary agentic solutions that offset typical six-figure enterprise SaaS licensing fees.
Compliance
Automated trade-based money-laundering pattern detection across the bank's monthly variance and declaration filings. Replaces ten person-days a month of manual analyst work with a generated report run on a weekly cadence.
Compliance
Continuous adverse-news screening across multiple sources, with semantic scoring used daily by the Compliance team for KYC and AML triage.
Infrastructure & operations
The systems above run on a production AI platform we built and operate ourselves: 28 Docker containers, self-hosted GitLab CI/CD, SigNoz observability, NVIDIA L40S inference on Nayatel Cloud GPU. Empirical capacity engineering — we proved that production load was constrained by system RAM, not GPU memory, and re-architected accordingly. The cloud-GPU footprint saves the bank PKR 20.45M annually versus an on-premises equivalent.
Dec 2015 – Sep 2024
Principal Investigator, Data Analytics Lab · Jan 2021 – Sep 2024
Tenured Assistant Professor · Dec 2015 – Sep 2024
22 publications · 470 citations · h-index 7 · i10-index 6 · 25+ MS students mentored · 15+ funded projects (PKR 40M+ in grants)
Source: Google Scholar (as of May 2026)
Chimera + AutoDock Vina, written for non-bioinformaticians
A practical tutorial taking life-science researchers from raw structure files to docked complexes without prior bioinformatics training. Cited 290 times — the most-cited paper of the lab and a primary teaching reference for early-career researchers entering computational structural biology.
JMIR Bioinformatics & Biotechnology · 2020 · 290 citations
Pro-apoptotic potential, computationally and in vitro
A combined computational and wet-lab evaluation of taxifolin's pro-apoptotic potential against hepatocellular carcinoma. Network analysis identified candidate targets; downstream assays validated the strongest hits. Representative of the lab's translational-bioinformatics output during the NUST years.
PeerJ · 2021 · 36 citations
Jan 2023 – Sep 2024
Independent consultant — 18 enterprise clients across finance, health-tech, and HR-tech. Architecture and data-maturity reviews; platform decisions; production builds where the math worked.
Designed and built for a US consultancy
End-to-end design and build of an AWS-native data lakehouse on S3, Glue, Redshift, and Lambda. ISO 27001-aligned. Delivered USD 250,000 in annual savings and a 30% infrastructure cost reduction. The same architecture pattern was reused across several client engagements.
US consultancy · 2023–2024
Deployed for an HR-tech startup
A churn-prediction model for an HR-tech startup, deployed in production. AUC 0.91 on held-out data; downstream the company reported a 35% lift in engagement on targeted retention workflows. Feature engineering and threshold calibration were the load-bearing decisions; the model itself was deliberately simple.
HR-tech startup · 2023–2024
2008 – 2015
PhD Informatics · University of Greenwich, UK · 2012–2015
BSc (Hons) Science · University of Greenwich, UK · 2008–2011
Postdoctoral research (Jan–Aug 2015) on machine learning and network analysis applied to biomedical data; one peer-reviewed publication.