I am a planetary scientist and space physicist pursuing probabilistic machine learning and inverse problems for scientific insight. I lead a research group in the Faculties of Science and Engineering at the University of Alberta and the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute. I am generally interested in advancing uncertainty quantification and interpretable machine learning for large-scale data, or automated methods, in the Earth and space sciences.

The majority of my research focuses on understanding current planetary space environments, and their previous conditions, by utilizing machine learning on large datasets from planetary missions (e.g. Mars, Saturn, Mercury, the solar wind). I am a member of the Science Team of NASA’s MAVEN mission where I lead machine learning efforts for understanding Mars’ space environment.

Before joining the University of Alberta, I was at the University of British Columbia’s Data Science Institute and Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences department as a Data Science Fellow. I have previously worked at the University of California Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory, IDA’s Science and Technology Institute, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the General Atomics DIII-D National Fusion Facility via the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, and the Colorado School of Mines.

My PhD was from the University of Michigan College of Engineering’s Climate and Space department where I was a NSF Graduate Research Fellow and NASA Earth and Space Sciences Fellow. I have an undergraduate degree from Smith College in Physics.

News and Updates

• Jan. 2025: The research group is recruiting for MS and PhD students. See the Group page for more information.
• Jan. 2025: A. R. Azari joins the University of Alberta and the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute.