Professor Feras A. Batarseh
Feras A. Batarseh, J.M., PhD is Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech, a researcher with the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative, and Director of the AI Assurance and Applications (A3) Lab at Virginia Tech. His research spans trustworthy AI, cyberbiosecurity, intelligent water systems, smart agriculture, and AI for public policy.
The A3 Lab, which Feras has directed since 2021, develops AI and cyberbiosecurity methods for water supply networks, wastewater treatment plants, and smart farms. In 2023, he opened the lab's AI and Cyber for Water and Ag (ACWA) facility on the Blacksburg campus, described by Virginia Tech as the world's first fully automated AI and cyberbiosecurity water lab.
Built with the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative and the Center for Advanced Innovation in Agriculture, ACWA is a testbed for simulating and defending against cyberattacks on water systems. Read Virginia Tech opens world's first fully automated AI and cyberbiosecurity water lab.
In 2024, his team partnered with AlexRenew, the wastewater authority for Alexandria, Virginia, to deploy deep learning models that predict flow spikes, virtual sensors, and generative adversarial networks that simulate attacks to flag anomalies in real time. Read New partnership uses AI to bolster efficiency, cybersecurity for water treatment. In 2022, he led a Virginia Tech team, partnered with DC Water, to the final round of the Intelligent Water Systems Challenge run by The Water Research Foundation and the Water Environment Federation. Read Team Contends to Protect Water Systems from Cyber Threats.
Feras was named a Fulbright U.S. Scholar for 2025–26, listed among Virginia Tech's Highly Prestigious and Prestigious Awards for 2025. The award supported research in Qatar on AI that detects, predicts, and mitigates threats to agricultural and water systems. From September 2025 to June 2026, he served as Visiting Professor at the Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute in Doha.
Between May and August 2025, he was Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Lebanese American University in Byblos, and in 2025 he was also a Visiting Professor at Rīga Stradiņš University in Latvia. Read Five scholars receive Fulbright Awards to confront urgent global challenges and Why water security is the next frontier of cyber warfare, according to expert.
In 2026, he led a team, with doctoral student Lauren Pincus and research associate Dan Sobien, that built a causal AI model of how semiconductor plants and irrigated agriculture compete for water across all 50 states, published in the Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management. Read As national drought deepens, a new AI model helps balance water demands.
With Yingjie Wang and Matthew Wilchek, he reviewed more than 100 studies on AI in water regulation, finding that only 18% incorporated trustworthiness and explainability assurances. Read From data to policy: a systematic review of AI in water regulations and compliance, Quantifying water effluent violations and enforcement impacts using causal AI, Friendshoring in global food supply chains in the European Review of Agricultural Economics, and A Review of Cybersecurity Incidents in the Food and Agriculture Sector, which proposes a Farmer-Centered AI framework.
His 2021 paper with Laura Freeman and Chih-Hao Huang, A survey on artificial intelligence assurance, scored more than 200 assurance methods. ResearchGate lists 107 publications and 1,799 citations.
Feras has edited three books for Elsevier Academic Press: AI Assurance: Towards Trustworthy, Explainable, Safe, and Ethical AI, Data Democracy: At the Nexus of Artificial Intelligence, Software Development, and Knowledge Engineering, and Federal Data Science: Transforming Government and Agricultural Policy Using Artificial Intelligence.
Feras joined Virginia Tech in November 2020 and received tenure in June 2025. From January 2015 to November 2020, he was Research Associate Professor at George Mason University, where he remains affiliate faculty of the School of Systems Biology. He also taught at Georgetown University in 2019, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County from 2018 to 2019, and The George Washington University in 2017. From May 2011 to December 2014, he was Program Manager at MicroStrategy in Tysons Corner, Virginia.
Feras earned his PhD in Computer Engineering in 2011 and his M.Sc. in Computer Engineering in 2007, both from the University of Central Florida, and his B.Sc. in Computer Science in 2006 from Princess Sumaya University for Technology in Amman, Jordan. He earned his Juris Master (J.M.) in Law in 2022 from George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School, a Graduate Certificate in Public Policy (Economics) in 2019 from the University of Oxford, and a Graduate Certificate in Civil and Environmental Engineering (Projects Leadership) in 2016 from Cornell University.
He is a Senior Member of IEEE, a member of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association, and, since 2023, a Special Collection Editor for the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers.
He was a co-investigator on the 4-VA planning grant CyberBioSecurity for Smart-Connected Communities. Listen to AI and Securing Water Systems with Feras Batarseh on Virginia Tech's Curious Conversations podcast, and read AI can predict and plan ahead for drought with access to the right data, experts say. Feras is based in Arlington, Virginia.
Visit his personal site, LinkedIn profile, Virginia Tech faculty page, Commonwealth Cyber Initiative profile, Google Scholar page, ResearchGate profile, IEEE Xplore author page, dblp page, Scilit profile, and Amazon author page. Follow him on Facebook and X.