Research Scientist — AI Systems & Trustworthy Machine Learning
Jamil Gafur
Assistant Research Scientist, Flatiron Institute / Polymathic AI · Ph.D. candidate, University of Iowa (Spring 2027)
I design and deploy resource-efficient, explainable AI systems — from agentic reasoning architectures to billion-parameter scientific foundation models. Over six years of research software engineering across the Flatiron Institute, Siemens, Cornell University, and the national laboratories (NREL, LANL).
At a Glance
| Current role | Assistant Research Scientist, Flatiron Institute / Polymathic AI |
| Education | Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science (expected Spring 2027), M.S. 2025 — University of Iowa |
| Focus areas | Agentic AI systems, foundation-model inference optimization, explainable & adversarial ML |
| Background | 6+ years across Flatiron Institute, Siemens, Cornell, NREL, and LANL |
| Publications | Bioinformatics, IJACSA, PEARC, CSCI (full list) |
What I Do
Agentic AI Systems
Distributed multi-agent orchestration and reasoning: recursive task decomposition into Directed Acyclic Graphs, persistent per-path knowledge blackboards, and MCP-compliant tooling across heterogeneous LLMs.
Foundation-Model Optimization
Production inference pipelines for large scientific foundation models — quantization, compression, and benchmarking automation that preserve statistical reliability while radically reducing compute and memory footprints.
Trustworthy Machine Learning
Explainable AI (XAI), adversarial robustness evaluation, and neural network pruning. My frameworks identify what models actually learn, stress-test them against edge cases, and compress them by up to 90% without sacrificing accuracy.
Selected Impact
Career Snapshot
| Years | Role | Organization |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 – present | Assistant Research Scientist | Flatiron Institute / Polymathic AI |
| 2026 | Multi-Agent Software Architectures Researcher | Siemens |
| 2021 – 2025 | Research Scientist, Data & Compute Systems | National Renewable Energy Laboratory |
| 2022 | Research Scientist, AI Systems & Computational Biology | Cornell University |
| 2018 – 2020 | Research Software Engineer | Los Alamos National Laboratory |
Selected Publications
- J. Gafur, O. Lang, W.K.M. Lai — “Adversarial Attack of Sequence-Free Enhancer Prediction Identifies Chromatin Architecture,” Bioinformatics, btaf371, 2025. DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btaf371
- J. Gafur, S. Goddard — “Structured Layer Pruning through Activation Variance,” CSCI’26, 2026. Accepted.
- J. Gafur, M. Milkert, K. Griffin, N. Wimer, C. Tripp, S. Goddard — “Exploring the Structure Resulting from Unstructured Neural Network Pruning,” IJACSA, Vol. 17, No. 6, 2026.