Ali Khan (’21) first learned to program from a Liberty Basic for Dummies book when he was just 11 years old. From there, he fed his passion for programming by teaching himself web development through Java — and even how to program his TI-84 calculator.

Fast-forward nearly two decades, and Khan is a second-year Ph.D. student in computer science and engineering at UNT.

He recently earned a $53,000 Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation, one of the most competitive research awards in the U.S. for a graduate student. The award will fund Khan’s research under his faculty advisor Sanjukta Bhowmick, an associate professor in computer science and engineering, for the duration of his Ph.D. and opens doors for networking with other top-tier researchers and labs across the nation.

Khan’s focus is the union of machine learning, high performance computing and graph theory. His research centers on developing scalable neurosymbolic algorithms for network comparison.

Read the whole story on UNT Research and Innovation.