Fifteen years from classical robust control into machine learning for medicine, robotics and quantum systems — and back again, because the mathematics travels.

Research

Robust and optimal control

Negative imaginary systems theory, robust stability analysis and feedback design. The doctoral work behind this line — New Results on Negative Imaginary Systems Theory with Application to Flexible Structures and Nano-Positioning, with Professor Ian Petersen at UNSW — extended the theory to systems with free body dynamics and to interconnections mixing negative imaginary and passivity properties.

The applications that keep pulling on it are physical: flexible structures that ring, nano-positioning stages that must settle without overshoot, and interconnected systems where each part is well behaved and the whole is not.

Deep learning for healthcare

Diagnostic models where being right is not enough on its own — a clinician has to be able to see why. Work here covers stroke diagnosis, breast cancer detection from mammograms, and interpretable multimodal architectures that combine imaging with other clinical signals.

Robotics and intelligent systems

Perception and autonomous navigation, including work at the KAUST Robotics Lab and the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge, where the team placed second runner-up in 2017.

Quantum systems

Quantum control and quantum computing, including the QQatar initiative founded at Qatar University.

Dynamical systems and game theory

Stability analysis, nonlinear dynamics and strategic interaction — the thread that connects the control work to models of how agents, rather than machines, settle into equilibria.

Mathematics education

The teaching platform at learn.mabroklab.com is a research interest as much as a teaching tool: what a course looks like when every answer is machine-checkable, when a tutor knows what a student has already got wrong, and when the record of a term is a dataset rather than a gradebook.

The group

Currently supervising MSc and PhD students at Qatar University, with several graduated. Topics span deep learning for healthcare, control theory and quantum systems.

Funding

Lead PI on grants totalling over one million dollars.