Hormoz Shahrzad is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, affiliated with the Cognizant AI Lab and serving as a visiting student researcher at Stanford’s Brain Dynamics Lab under Prof. Manish Saggar. His research spans evolutionary computation, distributed optimization, and interpretable decision-making in AI. He is also an active member of UT Austin’s Neural Networks Research Group (NNRG) (nn.cs.utexas.edu/?hormoz‑shahrzad).

His master’s thesis introduced BLADE, a scalable blanket‑based method that focuses evolutionary search on promising genomic regions using distributed hosts. As a Ph.D. student under Prof. Risto Miikkulainen, Hormoz continues to build advanced evolutionary AI frameworks and is collaborating with Stanford BDL to model brain‐state transitions toward personalized diagnostics.