Abdalaziz Sawwan

AI innovator: Abdalaziz Sawwan

School/College: College of Science and Technology
Degree/Year: PhD, computer and information sciences, 2025
Hometown: Amman, Jordan
Current Job Title: Research scientist
Current Employer: Meta

Every day, about 3.5 billion people, more than 40% of the world’s population, access tech giant Meta’s social media platforms. As a research scientist at the company, Abdalaziz Sawwan, CST ’25, helps design and evaluate changes to the personalization systems behind products like Instagram and Facebook while also searching for beneficial innovations within the company’s underlying technological infrastructure.

Working out of Meta’s headquarters in sunny Menlo Park, California, Abdalaziz focuses on how artificial intelligence (AI) systems perform in the real world in an efficient way. That means improving efficiency across a global fleet of data centers so that features ship smoothly and systems stay stable under massive demand. He spends a lot of time comparing alternatives and pressure-testing them at scale.

“We’re living through an AI moment where the pace is incredibly steep. The models being deployed today can do things that weren’t at all possible even a few months ago.”

—Abdalaziz Sawwan
Research scientist

Diving into research. At Temple, Abdalaziz began a five-year PhD focused on research across several areas, including wireless sensor networks and game theory, before narrowing his work to theoretical AI. Over the course of the program, he co-authored 17 papers. He was also recognized as the College of Science and Technology Outstanding Teaching Assistant in 2022 and Outstanding Graduate Research Assistant in 2023.

The industry came next. During Abdalaziz’s PhD, Meta invited him to a multistage interview process. He landed the internship and spent the summer running large-scale experiments and evaluated algorithm changes impacting millions of Instagram users. Meta extended a full-time offer for him to join after graduation.

Originally from Amman, Jordan, Abdalaziz was drawn early to math, science and engineering and earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Jordan. The summer before his senior year, he spent time in Galveston, Texas, where Abdalaziz got a feel for the pace and openness of the U.S. academic environment. It pushed him to aim for a PhD and a research path.

It began with a conversation. In Amman, Abdalaziz first met Jie Wu, Laura H. Carnell Professor of Computer and Information Sciences and director of Temple’s Center for Networked Computing. They stayed in touch over several weeks. During that time, Wu deliberately tested Abdalaziz’s strengths through problems, discussions and follow-ups to see whether he was the right fit, especially since Abdalaziz was coming from a different specialty. That extended back-and-forth led to an offer to join Wu’s lab for doctoral study.