Bio
Dr. Maria Mahbub is a Research Associate in the Cyber Resilience and Intelligence Division of the National Security Sciences Directorate at ORNL. She earned her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in August 2023. At ORNL, she leads research in multimodal AI, large language models, and natural language processing for high-stakes applications. Her work focuses on developing modern AI systems and strengthening their reliability in deployment, combining expertise in information extraction, interpretable predictive modeling, and retrieval-augmented generation.
She works extensively with multimodal data, including structured records, unstructured text, and genetic information, across national security and bioinformatics applications. Her research also spans adversarial robustness and computer vision, with a focus on model behavior in real-world settings. She has received the People's Choice Award as well as Second Place in the FY25 Your Science in a Nutshell Competition, and she is an awardee of the FY26 LDRD Early Career Competition.