Bio
Dr. Maria Mahbub is an AI/ML researcher in the Cyber Resilience and Intelligence Division of the National Security Sciences Directorate at ORNL. She leads research in multimodal AI, large language models, and natural language processing for high-stakes applications. Her work develops modern AI systems and strengthens their reliability in deployment, combining expertise in information extraction, interpretable predictive modeling, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
She works extensively with multimodal data, including structured records, unstructured text, and genetic information, across high-impact domains. Her research also spans adversarial robustness and computer vision, with a focus on model behavior in real-world settings. She has received multiple competitive honors, including Second Place and the People's Choice Award in the FY25 Your Science in a Nutshell Competition and an FY26 Early Career Competition LDRD. Her work aims to advance AI systems that are trustworthy, robust, and empirically grounded.