Welcome to the Atelier of one chimeric researcher

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Jerry Moran Center for Advanced Virtual Engineering & Testing lab, part of the National Institute for Aviation Research -NIAR- in Wichita, KS. My work focuses on aircraft crashworthiness, certification by analysis, simulation, and data-driven models. I also contribute theoretical foundations and numerical simulations to various projects, and collaborate with the aerospace engineering department to prepare students for the workforce.
My career spans over a decade of international R&D and engineering roles within the aerospace and automotive industries, encompassing simulation, analysis, and certification work in both direct employment and subcontracting capacities. For a detailed overview of my professional background, feel free to consult my CV or visit my LinkedIn page.
Since 2012, I have operated as an internationally mobile, polyglot engineer within multinational private industry environments. It was during an aircraft certification project at Safran that I made peace with my appetite for learning and my relentless compulsion to push the boundaries of what is mathematically tractable in modeling physical reality, which led me to pursue higher degrees that would lend both structure and legitimacy to my knowledge acquisition in the hard sciences, while opening more deliberate pathways into R&D.
In 2016, supported by a Fulbright scholarship, I once more uprooted my Moroccan life, this time to Wichita, KS, where I pursued my Master’s and PhD in aerospace engineering at Wichita State University while sustaining my career within the aircraft industry. The rest constitutes a tumultuous history that warrants its own telling.
Throughout my PhD, I was fully funded by AVET, benefitting from the co-advising and mentorship of Dr. Olivares, alongside the full support of my primary advisor Dr. James E. Steck. Dr. Steck’s engagement with machine learning and quantum computing inspired me to put into practice my own curiosity about both fields: I actively cultivated my understanding of ML and have been investigating its utility for numerical models and its integration into aerospace research and technology development. I also completed a minor in quantum mechanics under the guidance of the formidable Dr. Elizabeth Behrman, who remains one of my enduring scholarly role models, alongside the late Dr. Isakov, another cherished mentor whose memory I carry with gratitude.
Beyond technical knowledge acquisition and application, I read. I write. I mentor. I go on walks with dogs. I assemble furniture and teach English. I play video games. I acquire new languages. I meet new people. I discover local live music holes (check out Kirby’s if you are ever in Kansas).
And more often than not, I find myself at the cusp between a challenged apprentice uncovering new territory and a seasoned practitioner deepening trodden paths.