Rima Alaifari

Rima Alaifari is an Assistant Professor for Applied Mathematics at ETH Zürich, specializing in inverse problems, applied harmonic analysis, and scientific machine learning. She is an associated member of the ETH AI Center and will assume a full professorship at RWTH Aachen University in 2025. Her work focuses on stability analysis, regularization, and operator learning, with applications in phase retrieval and robustness of neural networks.

Alaifari holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Vrije Universiteit Brussel (2014), where she studied under Prof. Ingrid Daubechies and Prof. Michel Defrise. She completed her M.Sc. in Applied and Industrial Mathematics at Johannes Kepler University, Linz (2010). Her academic career includes postdoctoral fellowships at ETH Zurich (2014–2016) and a Marie Curie-funded position (2016).

Her research interests span inverse problems, phase retrieval, stability in machine learning, and operator learning. Notable projects include SNF-funded work on phase retrieval (2019) and collaborations on adversarial robustness in medical imaging (e.g., CT reconstruction). She has mentored PhD students Tandri Gauksson and Matthias Wellershoff, and postdocs Francesca Bartolucci (now at TU Delft) and Jesse Railo (Finnish Inverse Prize winner).

Teaching includes courses on inverse problems, time-frequency analysis, and robustness of deep neural networks. She actively participates in international conferences, delivering plenary talks at venues like the International Conference on Computational Harmonic Analysis (2022) and ICERM (2023). Her work bridges mathematical foundations and practical applications, emphasizing stability and robustness in computational methods.