Feras Al-Dirini
Assistant Professor, Electrical Engineering
Education
2015 | Ph.D. - Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia
2011 | B.Sc. - Electronics Engineering, Princess Sumaya University for Technology, Amman, Jordan
2010 | Exchange Program - Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois (UIUC), IL, USA
Contact Information
Research Interests
Nanoelectronics | Nanomaterials | AI Hardware | Neuromorphic AI | Probabilistic Computing | Sensing
Biography
Feras Al-Dirini (Member, IEEE) received the Ph.D. degree in electrical and electronic engineering from The University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia, in 2015. He then served as a Lecturer with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and a Research Fellow with the Center for Neural Engineering, The University of Melbourne, until August 2017. He joined King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM), Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, in September 2017, as an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering, where he founded and directed the Neurotronics Laboratory. Since September 2024, he is now a Visiting Scientist with the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA and a Senior Research Scientist with the School of Computing, Queen's University, Kingston, ON, Canada.
He conducted research visits to the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), CA, USA, in 2023 and 2022, the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), CA, USA, in 2023, the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (UIUC), Champaign, IL, USA, in 2009 and 2010; and the Institute for Microsystems Technology, Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH), Harburg, Germany, in 2009. His research interests are in AI Hardware Technologies, across the full technology stack, from materials and devices to circuits and systems. He enjoys engineering stochasticity to achieve Probabilistic AI, enabling Probabilistic Sensing and Autonomy, to Probabilistic Neural Networks and Deep Boltzmann Machines.
Dr. Al-Dirini was a recepient of the 2022 International Summer Scholars Award by KFUPM to conduct research at UC Berkeley. He was also recipient of the Australian Postgraduate Award and the National Information and Communication Technology Australia (NICTA) Ph.D. Top-Up Scholarship. He also received numerous prestigious regional awards by IEEE, such as the IEEE Darrel Chong Award, for his volunteer leadership service during his early years as a student. He also received the Princess Sumaya Scholarship and the Edexcel International High Achiever Award.