About me

I'm a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at Penn State University, advised by Prof. Vishal Monga. My research focuses on deep learning, with an emphasis on interpretable and convergent neural networks for image restoration and large language model–based frameworks for analyzing health misinformation. I also earned an M.Sc. in Computer Science & Engineering from Penn State, where I broadened my expertise in machine learning and optimization. Earlier, I completed my M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering at Sharif University of Technology, working on neural network architectures for decoding error-correcting codes. My academic journey began with a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, where I explored biomedical signal processing for retinal data analysis.
CV



Selected Publications

  • Health Misinformation Framework
    Samira Malek, et al. "A Methodology Framework for Analyzing Health Misinformation to Develop Inoculation Intervention Using Large Language Models: A case study on covid-19", submitted to Journal of Medical Internet Research, 2025.
  • Olympiad Mathematics
    Hamed Mahdavi, Alireza Hashemi, Majid Daliri, Pegah Mohammadipour, Alireza Farhadi, Samira Malek, et al. "Brains vs. bytes: Evaluating llm proficiency in Olympiad mathematics", Conference On Language Modeling, 2025.
  • CCUN Framework
    Samira Malek, et al. "Cascaded, Convergent Unrolled Deep Neural Networks for Blind Image Deconvolution", submitted to IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging, 2025.
  • Data-Driven Model
    Mohsen Farajijalal, Samira Malek, Arash Toudeshki, Joshua H Viers, Reza Ehsani, "Data-Driven Model to Improve Mechanical Harvesters for Nut Trees", ASABE Annual International Meeting, 2024.
  • IWCIT Paper
    Samira Malek, Saber Salehkaleybar, Arash Amini, "Multi Variable-layer Neural Networks for Decoding Linear Codes", Iran Workshop on Communication and Information Theory (IWCIT). IEEE, 2020.

Work Experience

Research Assistant

Applied Research Laboratory, Pennsylvania State University   |   Pennsylvania, USA   |   2024–2025

  • Developed a methodology powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) to detect health-related misinformation (both human-created and AI-generated) on social media.
  • Designed a hierarchical topic modeling framework to analyze misinformation and generate sentence-level topic descriptions.
  • Built a refutation generation module to explain inaccuracies and provide corrective responses with actionable guidance.
  • Applied the framework to datasets of COVID-19 and HPV vaccine misinformation, producing interpretable analyses.

Data Scientist

SNOWA   |   Tehran, Iran   |   2022

Contributed as a Data Scientist in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) department of SNOWA, a leading home appliance manufacturer in Iran. Key projects included:

  • Developed customer segmentation using unsupervised learning (e.g., K-means) to support targeted marketing.
  • Applied graph-based algorithms in SQL to identify and analyze customer relationship networks.
  • Designed and developed a scalable Data Warehouse to support business intelligence and analytics.

Contact Me

Feel free to reach out to me for collaborations, research discussions, or any inquiries. I'd love to hear from you!

samiramalek30@gmail.com

Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA