Experience

From defense and government labs to health AI

More than a decade of adversarial research across France, the USA and Italy, on programs funded by DARPA, the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, the Italian Ministry of University and Research, and the French ANR and AID.

Scientific Advisor (consultant), BRENUS PHARMA

July 2026 – June 2027 · Remote

• Advise leadership on bioinformatics architecture, sovereign-cloud infrastructure, data governance, patient-data security and the secure integration of AI agents.

Senior Scientist and Junior Professor, AI Security for Healthcare

INSERM and IMT Atlantique, LaTIM, Brest · December 2023 – present

• Researcher and key contributor to the Cybaile industrial chair (Thales, SOPHiA GENETICS, AiiNtense, CHU Brest) and the national PEPR SSF-ML-DH program.

• Director of two PhD theses on attacks and defenses for federated learning in hospitals. Results in IEEE TIFS 2026 and a 2nd Best Paper Award at IEEE FLTA 2026.

• Host of a NADIYA 2026 visiting fellow (Lviv Polytechnic) on privacy-preserving LLM and RAG for clinical records.

Board of Directors, ViDiTrust

Siena, Italy · 2024 – present

Research Scientist, Security of AI for Defense

Inria, Rennes · March 2022 – November 2023

• Researcher and key contributor to SAIDA, an ANR/AID defense program with Thales.

• Designed the RoSe and Mixer watermarking schemes for model IP protection (ICASSP 2023 Top 3% paper, extended in IEEE TDSC 2026).

• Co-supervised a Thales CIFRE PhD on backdoors in face recognition, defended in 2025.

Research Fellow, AI for Wireless Spectrum

NIST, Gaithersburg, MD, USA · February 2020 – February 2022

• Deep learning for radar detection and path-loss prediction in the 3.5 GHz CBRS band (IEEE DySPAN, WCNC).

Postdoctoral Researcher, R&D Scientist and AI Consultant

University of Siena and ViDiTrust, Siena; consulting for Centrica, Florence · May 2017 – February 2020

• Research on the DARPA/AFRL-funded MediFor and PREMIER programs: adversarial attacks on CNN forensics and an early clean-label backdoor attack (ICIP 2019, 700+ citations).

• Industrial R&D on anti-counterfeiting and social DRM; led developers.

Education

• HDR (Habilitation to supervise research), Computer Engineering and Signal Processing. University of Western Brittany, 2025.

• Executive MBA, Strategic Leadership. Quantic School of Business and Technology, 2024. 94.8/100, Zenith Scholarship.

• PhD, Information Engineering and Science. University of Siena, 2017. Springer Best-of-the-Best PhD Thesis (top 3).

• Advanced Master (2nd level), Wireless Systems. Politecnico di Torino, 2013.

• M.Sc. Computer and Communications Engineering (2012) and B.Sc. Telecommunications Engineering (2010). Lebanese International University.

Supervision

• Director of thesis: Carine Tannous (PhD, since 2024) and Hichem Faraoun (PhD, since 2024), IMT Atlantique.

• Co-supervisor: Quentin Le Roux (PhD CIFRE, Inria and Thales, 2022–2025) and Ehsan Nowroozi (PhD, University of Siena, 2017–2019).

• Master and internship supervision at Inria, IMT Atlantique and ViDiTrust.

Languages

Arabic (native) · English (C1) · Italian (C1) · French (B2)