Activities

MSA Club: 2023-Present
Local Community Activities: 2018-Present

I serve as Secretary of the Muslim Student Association at Clear Springs High School. I coordinate weekly Jumu’ah (Friday) prayers on campus and help organize events throughout the year.

• Help run two Ramadan events each year that serve meals to more than 600 people.
• Volunteer at local mosques in their community assistance programs.

2025-2026

For my Computer Science Independent Study at Clear Springs High School, I fine-tuned a RoBERTa transformer model to detect phishing across 877,565 URLs, emails, web pages, SMS and Telegram messages. Compared with an XGBoost model trained on the same data, it raised accuracy from 89.5% to 98.8% and cut false positives by 94.7%. The resulting paper was peer reviewed and accepted to the 4th International Conference on Intelligent Computing, Communication, Networking and Services (ICCNS 2026), where I presented it on September 23, 2026.

PUBLICATION:

• Paper: “Transformer-Based Models for Robust Phishing Detection in the Modern Cybersecurity Era”
• Authors: Raeef Dean (Clear Springs High School), Khondker Shajadul Hasan and Bhagya Lakshmi Putturu (Department of Computing Sciences, University of Houston-Clear Lake)
• Conference: ICCNS 2026, held September 22-25, 2026 in Bucharest, Romania, and technically co-sponsored by the IEEE Romania Section
• Proceedings: ICCNS 2026 Proceedings, IEEE Computer Society Conference Publishing Services; submitted to IEEE Xplore

2024-Present

I have served as software lead on a NASA HUNCH project for three consecutive years. HUNCH (High School Students United with NASA to Create Hardware) pairs high school students with real engineering problems from NASA. Each year we have addressed a different aspect of crew health on long-duration missions, where support from Earth is limited.

2026-27: Autonomous Crew Fatigue Management System (in progress)

We are building a modular autonomous system that fuses ocular computer vision with a physiological alertness model to estimate crew fatigue. It then re-optimizes the mission schedule under hard operational and medical constraints.

2025-26: Lunar Habitat Wellness System

We built an AI system that fuses facial-emotion recognition with wearable biometrics into a continuous wellness score for each crew member. A declining score triggers tiered environmental interventions in the habitat before stress becomes critical.

• Selected as NASA HUNCH Regional Finalist.

2024-25: In-Suit Medical Emergency Detection System

We developed an LLM-powered medical monitoring system designed for integration into astronaut suits. It detects emergent health events and surfaces real-time mitigation strategies without ground-control latency.

• Selected as a NASA HUNCH National Finalist.
• 1 of 30 projects nationwide chosen to present at the 2025 NASA Human Research Program International Conference.

2023-Present

I founded Charger TSA at Clear Springs High School in 2023, the first Technology Student Association chapter in Clear Creek ISD, and served as its president for its first three years. TSA is a national organization in which students compete in technology and engineering events, from software development to forensic science. The chapter has grown from 16 members to more than 100 and has earned 19 regional, 10 Texas state and 1 national award.

In 2026 I directed the TSA Space City Regional Competition, managing logistics for more than 20 schools and 400 participants. I also secured over $6,000 in sponsorships from Clear Lake-area Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Jaguar, Land Rover and Volvo dealerships.

2025-26 AWARDS:

• National 4th Place, Forensic Science
• 4 Texas State awards, including 5th Place in Software Development
• 8 regional awards, including 1st Place in Software Development

2024-25 AWARDS:

• Recognized by the Clear Creek ISD Board of Trustees for our performance
• 6 Texas State finalist awards, including 3rd and 4th Place finishes
• 8 regional awards, including 2nd Place in Software Development

2023-24 AWARDS:

• Regional 1st Place Software Development
• Regional 8th Place Music Production
• Regional 8th Place Video Game Design

2026-Present

I was elected Student Council President at Clear Springs High School, representing a student body of about 2,668. I lead the planning and execution of school-wide events, including the Homecoming Carnival, pep rallies and Red Ribbon Week, as well as our toy and food drives.

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS:

• October 2026: Recruited the “Blue Crewe,” a group of 30 student volunteers who support our largest events.

Summer 2024

I worked as a High School Research Assistant at the University of Houston Clear Lake’s 3D printing laboratory. I worked on a National Science Foundation grant funded research project. Our team was researching ways to utilize 3D printing to help design composite molds with embedded sensors. Embedded sensors for composite manufacturing molds enable the monitoring of parameters such as the temperatures of the resin during the curing process. I designed and constructed a complete model demonstrating how sensors can directly be embedded within 3D printed molds using advanced G-CODE editing techniques and the use of microcontrollers. I then used a FLIR thermal imaging camera with the FLIR Research Studio software to record thermal data to compare with the readings from the embedded thermal sensor. Overall, this research is a steppingstone towards clean energy manufacturing, and I am honored to be a part of this team, which inspired me in our mission of zero emission manufacturing.

2019-2026 AWARDS:

• 2026 District Grand Award in Physical Science
• 2024 District Grand Award Winner
• Selected as one of the Top 300 Junior Innovators in the 2023 Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovator Challenge.
• Won the 2nd Place Award at the Texas Science and Engineering Fair (TXSEF, March 2023).
• Won the Grand Award in the Physical Sciences category in the Science and Engineering Fair of Houston (Feb. 2023).
• Won the 1st Place Award in the Systems Software category in the Science and Engineering Fair of Houston (SEFH, Feb. 2023).
• Won the District Grand Award in Physical Sciences in the combined (Junior and Senior) division at the school district (Jan. 2023).
• Won the 1st Place Award in the Junior Division at the school district.
• 2nd Place Elementary School science fair.

Fall 2024

I was awarded a merit scholarship from the U.S. Department of State to study Mandarin Chinese through the Virtual NSLI-Y program (National Security Language Initiative for Youth). Mandarin was my fifth language, after English, Bengali, Spanish and French, and my first outside the alphabets I already knew.

2023-2025

As a passionate language learner, I ventured deeper into the Indo-European language tree. With two years of Spanish under my belt, I decided to try out French. In my first year of French I fell in love with the language and expect to continue my learning.

J’adore apprendre le français !

2023 AWARDS:

• Lauréat National médaille de bronze – Le Grand Concours

2023-2024

Being part of team Chips 324 in the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) is awesome! The challenge of building a competition-worthy robot in just six weeks pushes my problem-solving skills to the limit. Working alongside teammates with different strengths, from coding to machining, is a blast. We learn from each other and push each other to be better. There’s nothing quite like the thrill of competition day, putting our robot to the test and strategizing with our alliance partners. It’s more than just robots; it’s about teamwork, innovation, and having a ton of fun!

2023 ACHIEVEMENTS:

• Ranked 27 in FIRST in Texas district
• Ranked 9 in Texas State competition
• Qualified for FRC worlds and competed in the Galileo division.

2020-2023

I participated in BEST Robotics throughout my intermediate school. I was the Software Lead and a driver during my 8th grade year. Our team was the Houston hub champion in the regional competition, and we won the third-place BEST award at the Texas State competition in December 2022.

2019-2020

I participated in the VEX Robotics competition during my 5th grade year. I was the programmer of the “Autonomous Systems”. Our team was the school district champion and we were the runner-up at the Texas State VEX Robotics competition.

2018-Present

Every year during the Islamic month of Ramadan, I volunteer at different local mosques in distributing food and other necessities.

I also volunteer at local events for my FRC robotics team. I have visited elementary school VEX teams and middle school BEST teams to teach and help the younger students prepare for their competitions! It’s something I really enjoy to do because I see a younger version of myself in them.

I volunteered at TechCrunch Sessions: AI 2025, held at UC Berkeley, a conference that brought together founders, researchers and investors working in artificial intelligence.