Ussama Zahid completed his MS in Computer Science in the Accelerated Connected Computing Lab at KAUST. He worked on hardware acceleration of machine learning. He is currently Staff AI Engineer at Synopsys.

Before joining KAUST, he was as a research engineer intern at Xilinx Research Labs, Dublin, Ireland where he worked on quantized and robust training of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), resulting in patents and publications.

He received his Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electrical Engineering from the National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Islamabad, Pakistan in 2019, with his thesis research undertaken at TU Kaiserslautern, Germany. He completed his MS in Computer Science at KAUST in 2022.