I'm a PhD candidate in Computer Science at The Pennsylvania State University. I previously completed two research engineering internships with Qualcomm's Video Compression team in Summer 2023 and Summer 2024. Prior to graduate school, I received my Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 2020.

My research focuses on memory-efficient and asynchronous-distributed training, as well as model merging techniques for improving the post-training efficiency and accessibility of Small Language Models (SLMs).

Reach me at pmahdavi@psu.edu.