Parham did his PhD at York University on classical and quantum computing methods for simulating geomagnetic disturbance effects on modern power systems. Six years of research (2019–2025) building computational and numerical tools for energy industry analysis.
Before academia, he was a blockchain developer at Lagrange Labs, managing Ethereum and Polygon nodes, running infrastructure as code with Terraform and Docker, and implementing trusted execution environments on AMD EPYC. He then spent two years at Huawei as an associate researcher, building ML models for energy pattern prediction in microgrid systems — statistical analysis on time series data, photovoltaic optimization, the works.
Now he's back at York as a postdoc, researching AI-enabled simulation for weather-based outage prediction in large-scale power systems. He also freelances as a generative AI specialist, focused on quantum computing and cybersecurity applications.
His work sits at the intersection of AI, quantum computing, and infrastructure resilience. The CPPS-SEC Lab he built simulates realistic ICS attack chains against power grid infrastructure — false data injection, Modbus exploitation, MQTT takeover — to expose detection gaps in real-world deployments.
Talks at DC416
Killing Watts — ICS Attack Chains Against Power Systems
Power grids run on protocols that were never designed to be secure. Modbus doesn't authenticate. MQTT trusts whoever connects. State estimation believes whatever data you feed it. Parham built a full ICS attack simulation lab and ran real attack chains against it — false data injection into state estimation, Modbus register overwrites, MQTT broker takeover, and chained attacks against distributed energy resources. The operator dashboard stayed green the entire time.
Affiliations
- York University — Postdoctoral Researcher
- Lagrange Labs — Blockchain Developer (prev.)
- Huawei — Associate Researcher (prev.)
- CPPS-SEC Lab — ICS Attack Simulation Research