Research with purpose: Inside UM-Dearborn’s fully funded graduate programs

Blog post written by Hunter Amo

One of the most important aspects of pursuing a PhD is having the support needed to focus on your research. A big part of that support is funding. For that reason, UM-Dearborn offers four fully funded PhD programs in the College of Engineering and Computer Science. Through appointments as Graduate Student Instructors (GSI), Research Assistants (GSRA), or a combination of both, students receive funding in the form of a competitive monthly stipend, health insurance, and a tuition waiver.

Abbas Ali and Alireza Khalilian, both pursuing doctoral degrees in electrical and computer engineering, provided insights into what PhD research is like at UM-Dearborn. They discuss their current research and how the fully funded nature of UM-Dearborn’s program is helping them to achieve their dreams. 

Abbas Ali and cyber-physical systems

Abbas Ali is making groundbreaking contributions to the world of hardware fingerprinting for cyber-physical systems, or, as Abbas described it, “teaching machines to recognize hardware the way humans recognize each other.” 

Some everyday examples of cyber-physical systems include self-driving cars, robot arms on a factory floor or in an operating room, insulin pumps, and traffic lights. “Each of these systems often proves its identity using digital credentials, much like a badge or a password,” Abbas explained. “Now imagine someone steals that badge, copies it perfectly, and hands it to an impostor device. To every existing security system, that impostor looks completely legitimate, because it carries the right credentials.” 

Every electronic device has its own unique physical imperfections at the microscopic level—things like impedance, parasitic capacitance, and transistor variations—which cause it to emit slightly different electrical signals when it operates. Those subtle differences are essentially the hardware's fingerprint. Because of those tiny differences, it is easier for systems to recognize illegitimate hardware, kind of like how humans can recognize each other by voice. This prevents hardware attacks and keeps us safe.

While Abbas is analyzing hardware devices, UM-Dearborn students and faculty members have been cheering him on from the sidelines. “Graduate research at UM-Dearborn has been one of the most hands-on and rewarding experiences of my academic life,” Abbas said. “I design my own experiments, build hardware setups from scratch, write the code, and analyze the results, while always having guidance close by when I need to think through the bigger picture.” And the funding for his research was a plus: “As a PhD student, having that financial support made it possible for me to focus fully on research without worrying about additional financial pressure, and that mattered a great deal to me.” 

Alireza Khalilian and metalenses

Similar to Abbas, Alireza is also working in the field of fingerprinting with the use of handcrafted metalenses. Metalenses are small, flat lenses (as opposed to the curved ones in glasses and cameras) that use tiny surface patterns to guide light in a specific direction. This is useful in AI-assisted object identification, where the lens is used to find information about an object that a human eye cannot see. This includes surface texture, material properties, and biological composition. 

If that sounds confusing, consider the example that Alireza gave to me: “A regular camera mostly records brightness and color. Some of my recent work uses tiny flat lenses to capture extra information from light that a normal camera may miss. One way to think about this is that light carries hidden clues about the surface, structure, or material of an object, and our device is designed to read some of those clues.”

Fun fact: Some of the metalenses that Alireza is designing are smaller in diameter than a human hair!

Alireza hopes that, in the future, metalenses like his can be used in medical settings to look at places within the human body. “Because of their extremely small size, similar optical devices could eventually be integrated into miniature probes, endoscopes, or catheter-based imaging systems,” Alireza said. “Similar imaging methods could potentially help identify early changes in biological tissues, including changes related to cancer, because abnormal tissue can interact with light differently than healthy tissue.” 

Thanks to connections made at UM-Dearborn, Alireza has opportunities to showcase his work with other researchers, gain interdisciplinary experience, and receive valuable feedback. “UM-Dearborn has provided an environment where research can grow beyond one laboratory,” Alireza added. “The university gives graduate students opportunities to showcase their work through poster presentations, research events, conferences, and academic discussions." 

Another important part of my graduate research experience has been the opportunity to publish and present my work in respected venues.” Alireza has published his research in two photonics journals and presented his research at major conferences. 

The benefits of a fully funded program

Like Abbas, Alireza agreed that UM-Dearborn’s funding for doctoral research was an important factor in his choice of school. 

“The fully funded nature of the PhD program had a major impact on my decision,” Alireza said. “For me, the funding also showed that UM-Dearborn was seriously investing in its PhD students. Graduate research requires years of commitment, and having stable support made it possible for me to take on challenging research projects, spend long hours in the lab, and build the skills needed to become an independent researcher.” 

Alizera was also provided financial support for research materials, equipment, and travel expenses, allowing him to participate in conferences around the country.