Experts in Every Field

Meet Our Experts

LSU is the flagship research university of Louisiana. Being the flagship is much more than a designation. It is a call to action. We deliver the education, research, and solutions that will lead Louisiana and impact the world. As many as 180 LSU faculty use AI and machine learning to advance their research. Some of them also develop and secure AI as a technology. Here, meet some of our leaders in the field.

AI for Better Animal Care

Neoklis Apostolopoulos, assistant professor of veterinary dermatology, focuses on applications of artificial intelligence in veterinary dermatology and otology. He is developing tools with computer vision and fine-tuned large language models with retrieval-augmented generation to support diagnostics and education. His funded research includes AI-powered tools for diagnosing ear diseases in dogs. At LSU, he co-leads the Dermatology, Ear and Allergy Service that is part of the LSU Veterinary Teaching Hospital and directs the Neoklis Apostolopoulos Veterinary Dermatology Laboratory, which is first in the world to develop computer vision tools for pet ear diseases. Recent peer-reviewed publications include the development of a detection tool for canine external ear canal lesions using AI, and a computer vision model for the detection of canine pododermatitis and neoplasia of the paw. Dr. Apostolopoulos earned his veterinary degree from the University of Thessaly, Greece, in 2011 and became a board-certified specialist in 2021. In 2025, he completed the LSU AI & Machine Learning Bootcamp, a program focused on Python, natural language processing, deep learning, and generative AI.

AI for Stronger National Security

James Ghawaly, assistant professor of computer science and engineering, is focused on applications of deep learning for national security while developing neuromorphic computing and spiking neural networks. His federally funded research includes the development of an AI-enabled memory block validator (Department of Defense, $136,000), compact radiation arrays for tracking and interdiction (Department of Energy, $678,000), and AI models to protect the nation against nuclear threats (Department of Energy, $750,000, part of a $25 million project with 15 universities and eight national labs). At LSU, Ghawaly teaches the honor’s course Large Language Model Development and Deployment for Real-World Applications, for which he received the Robert L. “Doc” Amborski Teaching Award in 2025. Some of his most recent published work includes the development of a local large language model for digital forensics, the exploration of large language models for semantic analysis and categorization of android malware, and a performance optimization study of the neuromorphic radiation anomaly detector. Ghawaly earned his Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Tennessee Knoxville in 2020.

AI Machinations, Explained

Keith Mills, assistant professor of computer science and engineering, is focused on automated and efficient machine learning for broad, interpretable artificial intelligence tasks ranging from foundational generative models to smaller, predictive neural networks. Prior to joining LSU, he received the highly competitive Alberta Innovates Graduate Student Scholarship to pursue a project developing data-driven, explainable approaches for generating better, faster, and more efficient deep neural networks (DNN). At LSU, Mills teaches courses on artificial intelligence as well as data analysis and mining and is also involved in the development of an introductory course to DNN and an advanced DNN acceleration and compression course. Some of his most recent published work includes interpretable quantization and pruning for foundational generative models as well as a framework for optimizing the underlying computational graph structure of a DNN to improve efficiency. Mills earned his Ph.D. in Software Engineering and Intelligent Systems from the University of Alberta in 2025, where his thesis received the George Walker Award for Best Doctoral Thesis.

AI to Prevent Wildfires, Discover Drugs

Supratik Mukhopadhyay, professor of environmental science, is an AI and Data Analytics Faculty Fellow with the LSU Office of Data and Strategic Analytics. In 2020, Mukhopadhyay led the LSU DeepDrug team for AI-based drug discovery as far as the semifinal in the prestigious AI XPRIZE competition among 147 teams worldwide. In 2025, he led the DeepFire team for AI-based wildfire prediction and detection to the final of the space-based detection track of the Wildfire XPRIZE among more than 300 global teams—with technology licensed by Firemark AI. Mukhopadhyay’s research advances safe AI via novel architectures and algorithms. His COMBOOD framework leads the OpenOOD leaderboard in near-OOD (out-of-distribution) detection on ImageNet-1k and ImageNet-200 benchmarks. For this work, he received the Best Poster Runner-Up Award at the 2024 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining. His DeepSat framework underlies the NASA Earth Exchange. In 16 years at LSU, Mukhopadhyay has won more than $9 million in research funding from NSF, DARPA, NASA, DOD, DOE, USDOT, USDA, and other agencies. He holds four U.S. patents, with an additional eight pending, and serves as associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence and Remote Sensing Letters.