People

Lab Director – Dr. Minhaj Nur Alam

Dr. Minhaj Nur Alam is a biomedical imaging and computer vision scientist with expertise in the field of biomedical imaging and medical artificial intelligence (AI). He has extensive research experience developing AI models for medical AI tasks, optical device instrumentation (optical coherence tomography angiography (OCT/OCTA)), and quantitative imaging biomarkers. Dr. Alam trained as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Stanford University Department of Biomedical Data Science with a research focus on developing self-supervised and cross-modal prediction models in ophthalmology and radiology applications. He was also part of a stealth mode AI startup that focused on sensorless biomarker detection for health analytics. He holds a Ph.D. degree in Bioengineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), with a focus on optical imaging and AI-based objective classification of different types of retinopathies.

Ph.D. students

Sina Gholami – sgholami@charlotte.edu

Sina’s Ph.D. research is focused on medical diagnosis and prognosis and federated learning. He earned a master’s degree in AI & Data Engineering from the University of Pisa (UniPi) and worked as a research and AI developer on image classification and segmentation tasks for five months. Sina holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the Baha’i Institute of Higher Education (BIHE).

Rashadul Hasan Badhon – rbadhon@charlotte.edu

Badhon’s Ph.D. research is focused on ophthalmic imaging biomarkers and their AI applications for disease diagnosis. He has an MS degree in Biomedical Engineering from Illinois Tech, and a BS in EE from IUT, Bangladesh.

Ahammed Sakir Nabil – anabil@charlotte.edu

Ahammed’s Ph.D. research focus is at the intersection of Vision and Language Models, and data privacy through federated learning. At the QIAI lab, he is working actively to promote privacy, explainability, interpretability, and human interaction in AI-based systems for healthcare. He completed his Master’s degree courses in Computer Science from North South University, Bangladesh, and has his thesis dissertation pending only. During his Master’s, Ahammed worked extensively on developing Vision Language Models that can help in Language directed Image Segmentation. Moreover, Ahammed also has a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from IUT, Bangladesh with research focused on Machine Learning for security in Hardware-In-The-Loop (HIL) based power systems.

Tania Haghighi – thaghigh@charlotte.edu

Tania is pursuing her Ph.D., focusing on large language models and vision-language models for generating images and natural text in the medical domain. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the Baha’i Institute for Higher Education (BIHE).

Sadia Siraz – ssiraz@charlotte.edu

At the QIAI lab, Sadia’s PhD research focuses on Vision Models and Medical Image Processing, specifically AI-based ophthalmic disease diagnostics and biomarker extraction. Driven by her passion to create immediate positive impact on human lives, she transferred to UNC Charlotte in Spring 2025 from the University of Maryland, College Park, shifting her research from Photonics to Medical AI. She holds a Bachelor’s in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Islamic University of Technology, where she also served as a lecturer from 2022-2023.

Master Students

David Nichols – dnicho26@uncc.edu

Undergraduate Students

Gavin Kelley – gkelley3@charlotte.edu