Faculty Directory

Dr. Reza Ghanadan is Professor and Executive Director of Innovations in AI at the A. James Clark School of Engineering and the Institute for Systems Research at the University of Maryland, where he leads initiatives in AI engineering, robust and trustworthy AI systems, agentic intelligence, and applied AI for science and engineering. He is an affiliated research professor with the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, the Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute at Maryland (AIM), and the Center for Machine Learning at the University of Maryland. His work focuses on advancing scalable, reliable, and deployable AI systems that bridge foundational research with real-world impact across industry, government, and mission-critical applications. He is an IEEE Fellow, recognized for leadership in robust AI technologies and applications.

Prior to joining academia, Dr. Ghanadan held senior leadership roles across industry, government, and advanced research organizations. He was a senior engineering and research leader at Google, where he led AI research, machine perception, and strategic technology initiatives, including work on enterprise-scale AI systems and robust AI applications across multiple industries. He later served at Amazon as Senior Principal Scientist and Science Director in Alexa AI and AGI, where he led teams of scientists, engineers, and product managers developing next-generation multimodal AI assistants and embodied AI technologies at large scale.

Earlier, as a Program Manager at DARPA, Dr. Ghanadan created and directed several large-scale AI, autonomy, and scientific discovery programs that advanced foundational methods in machine learning, reasoning, autonomy, and data science. These programs brought together leading teams from academia, industry, and government to address complex challenges spanning robotics, neuroscience, healthcare, materials science, social-cognitive systems, and intelligent autonomous systems.

Dr. Ghanadan previously served as a Technical Fellow at Boeing, an Engineering and Scientific Fellow at BAE Systems, and was a founding team member of Flarion Technologies, a pioneering wireless startup later acquired by Qualcomm. He began his career at AT&T Bell Laboratories, where he worked on adaptive autonomous systems, communications, and large-scale intelligent networks.

Over the course of his career, Dr. Ghanadan has led multidisciplinary teams developing advanced AI, autonomy, communications, and distributed systems technologies with applications in defense, enterprise AI, healthcare, telecommunications, robotics, and scientific discovery. His research interests include robust AI engineering, generative and agentic AI, embodied intelligence, neuro-symbolic reasoning, trustworthy autonomous systems, frontier AI systems, and scalable AI platforms for real-world deployment.

Dr. Ghanadan holds B.S. degrees in Physics and Electrical Engineering, both Summa Cum Laude, as well as M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland. He also earned an Executive MBA from the New York University Stern School of Business. He holds numerous patents and publications in AI, autonomous systems, signal processing, and intelligent networks.