Rate My Professor Muhammad Niazi

Muhammad Niazi is a researcher in the Division of Engineering at New York University, Abu Dhabi. He specializes in the modeling and control of sociotechnical systems, combining nonlinear control, scientific machine learning, and game theory to create safer and smarter infrastructure for urban mobility and public health. His work addresses challenges such as epidemic mitigation through optimal control strategies and resilient state estimation in large-scale network systems. Niazi earned his Ph.D. in automatic control engineering from Université Grenoble Alpes in France in 2021, where he served as a graduate research assistant affiliated with INRIA Grenoble and GIPSA-Lab. He previously obtained his master's degree in electrical and electronics engineering from Bilkent University in Turkey and his bachelor's degree from COMSATS Institute of Information Technology in Pakistan. His doctoral studies were supported by scholarships, including a six-month grant from INRIA under the Mission COVID-19 framework.

Niazi's career includes postdoctoral positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA and KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, where he currently holds a researcher position. He was a Marie-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow from the European Commission from September 2022 to August 2025. Key publications include "Learning-based design of Luenberger observers for autonomous nonlinear systems" (American Control Conference, 2023), "Optimal Control of Urban Human Mobility for Epidemic Mitigation" (IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 2021), "Modeling and control of epidemics through testing policies" (Annual Reviews in Control, 2021), "Average state estimation in large-scale clustered network systems" (IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems, 2020), and "A differential game model of opinion dynamics: Accord and discord as Nash equilibria" (Dynamic Games and Applications, 2021). He received the Finalist award for Best Student Paper at the 2019 European Control Conference and is a full member of Sigma Xi, nominated in 2025. Niazi has contributed to the field through service on the Conference Editorial Board of the IEEE Control Systems Society, as Finance Chair for its students and early career researchers committee, and as a mentor in the Fatima Al-Fihri Predoctoral Fellowship program. He co-organized the Stockholm Workshop on Emerging Topics in Systems and Control at KTH in June 2022. At NYU Abu Dhabi, his research group develops digital twins using physics-informed learning for applications in intelligent transportation systems.