I am a PhD student at MBZUAI under Dr Hanan Aldarmaki working on building speech models for real world impact, particularly in low-resource and atypical speech areas. My PhD thesis is on building models for automatic stutter severity assessment in collaboration with speech-language pathologists. I enjoy collaborating on interesting resource development projects and contributing open-source resource for the research community.
I’ve lived in Ilorin & Lagos (Nigeria), Pisa (Italy), and now Abu Dhabi (UAE)! In general, I have benefited greatly from the advice of friends and acquaintances alike. If you have questions on graduate school that you think I might be able to help answer, write me an email.
Education & Research Visits
- Visiting Researcher at ISTI-CNR, Pisa (2025).
- PhD Natural Language Processing from MBZUAI (Exp. 2028)
- M.Sc. in Machine Learning from MBZUAI 2024
- B.Eng. Computer Engineering UniIlorin 2021
Teaching Experience
MBZUAI
- Teaching Assistant [NLP803: Advanced Speech Processing] Spr’ 26 – 20 students
- Teaching Assistant [NLP701: Speech Processing] Spr’ 26 – 20 students
- Teaching Assistant [DS702: Big Data Processing] Spr’ 21 – X students
Awards & Hackathons Won
- Fee Waiver Recipient, Advanced Language Processing Winter School ALPS, 2026
- Research Fellowship Grant from ITSERR - Italian Strenghtening of the Esfri Ri Resilience - Trans-National Program, 2024
- Inspirational Leader Award at MBZUAI commencement, 2024
- Graduate Student Council Award at MBZUAI commencement, 2024
- Best Paper Award at ArabicNLP 2023
- Champion at GITEX x Ali Baba Cloud Hackathon Oct 2023
- Selected Scholar for Cornell, Maryland, Max Planck Pre-Doctoral Research School (CMMRS) 2021