Muhammad Hammad Khalid
Hammad is a fourth year PhD candidate working as a graduate research assistant at the SoTeRiA lab under the supervision of Prof. Zahra Mohaghegh. Hammad has been working on a project sponsored by the Department of Energy (DOE) Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP) during the first three years of his PhD. This project which is also a part of Hammad’s PhD thesis is focused on devising risk-informed strategies to safely introduce and deploy automation technologies inside nuclear power plants. Hammad is working on establishing novel methodologies to estimate the trustworthiness and improve the transparency of automation technologies. This research provides robust evidence to stakeholders about the operational acceptability and feasibility of automation technologies. Such evidence can be transformed into good business cases, eventually helping the stakeholders in their decisions to make large-scale investments in these technologies.
Before coming to the U.S. and starting his PhD, Hammad worked as a graduate research assistant at the Beijing Key Laboratory of Passive Safety between 2017 and 2020 while completing his master’s degree in Nuclear Energy Science and Engineering at North China Electric Power University (NCEPU), Beijing China. Hammad’s master thesis was focused on probing jamming phenomenon inside a Pebble Bed Reactor (PBR) using advanced Discrete Element Methods (DEM). Hammad did his Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering at Pakistan Institute of Engineering and Applied Sciences (PIEAS) based in Islamabad, Pakistan, where his final year project was focused on designing and fabricating the chassis of an automobile and conducting its advanced safety analysis.
Hammad is a recipient of Mavis Future Faculty fellowship (2024-2025), Nuclear Education, Skills, and Technology (NEST) fellowship (2023-present) and the Chinese Government Scholarship (2017-2020). Presently, he is also serving as one of the active members of the Graduate Student Advisory Committee (GSAC) as well as the Engineering Graduate Student Advisory Committee (E-GSAC). As a NEST fellow, Hammad was one of the three candidates from the entire country nominated to attend the Halden Human-Technology-Organisation (HTO) Summer School on Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Nuclear. Hammad also attended the NEST Small Modular Advanced Reactor Training (SMART) in May 2023, and won first prize for his group’s project on the risk-informed deployment of microreactors.
Hammad’s research interests include Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA), Risk-Informed Decision-Making (RIDM), Automation trustworthiness, Automation transparency, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Deep learning, Physics-informed machine learning, Uncertainty Quantification (UQ), Virtual Reality (VR), Human Factors and Nuclear Simulators.