Research Team

Ahmed Elsousy

Ahmed is a PhD student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. Before that, he received his BSc in 2025 and was an undergraduate researcher in the SEAD group at the American University in Cairo. Outside work, he enjoys racing, soccer, pool, gaming, chess, and weightlifting, among other things. He also listens to a lot of music and reads about psychology, history (especially technical history), and classic literature.

Marwan Mekhemer

Marwan graduated from McMaster University with a BEng in Electrical and Biomedical Engineering in 2021. During his undergraduate degree, he completed a 16-month co-op at AMD, working on RTL design for hardware blocks within the graphics core. Following graduation, Marwan returned to AMD, where he worked in RTL and modeling roles before beginning graduate studies in 2025. His research interests lie in computer architecture and digital hardware design. Outside work, Marwan enjoys soccer, fencing, and video games.

Balaji Venkatesh

Balaji Venkatesh is a part-time MASc student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. His research interests include reconfigurable computing and computer networks. He holds a BASc in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto, specializing in Computer Engineering.

Balaji is also a full-time Software Analyst at Hitachi Rail Canada. There, he develops safety-critical software for automated rail projects. Outside research and work, he enjoys volleyball, model railroading, and tinkering with 3D printers and mechanical keyboards.

Thomas Badros

Thomas is a PhD student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. He earned his BSc with the highest honors in Electronics and Computer Engineering and a minor in Computer Science from the American University in Cairo (AUC) in 2025. His research interests include AI acceleration, reconfigurable computing architectures, and hardware–software co-design. He was an undergraduate researcher in the SEAD group at AUC. His thesis work was supervised through the Center of Nanoelectronics and Devices (CND) and sponsored by Valeo.

Outside academics, Thomas enjoys gaming, martial arts, music production, television series and anime, table tennis, and chess. He listens to many genres of music, particularly classical and rock, and enjoys reading and debating philosophy, especially metaphysics.

Kerry Li

Kerry graduated from the University of Toronto with an Honours BSc in Computer Science in 2023. During his undergraduate degree, he completed a 12-month internship at AMD, working on RTL design verification, and returned full-time after graduation. In 2025, he began graduate studies at the University of Toronto before transferring to the University of Waterloo in 2026 to pursue a MASc. Kerry’s research interests are in FPGA CAD algorithms and architecture. In his free time, he enjoys video games and badminton.

Lakshya Rao

Lakshya is an MASc student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. He graduated with distinction from Waterloo with a BASc in Computer Engineering during which he completed 5 internships across industry working on network processor design at Huawei, CPU design at Marvell, SoC design for a 2.5D inference accelerator at Untether AI, platform design at Altera, and modernizing audio consoles with FPGAs at Evertz. His academic interests sit in hardware for physical AI, systems research, and beyond-LLM thinking. Outside of academics, Lakshya likes taking long walks in the sun, strength training, watching classic films (Indiana Jones, Dollars Trilogy), and exploring different meditative practices.