About Me

I am an engineer by training. I attended Pak-Swiss Training Center, a vocational college in Karachi, Pakistan, and earned a diploma in Precision Mechanics and Instrumentation Technology in 1983 and another post-diploma certification in Industrial Electronics in 1985. I started my professional career with Digital Communications, a company in Karachi that pioneered PABX development in Pakistan with indigenous designs and local manufacturing. Later I worked in Saudi Arabia for a few years with a Saudi-German consortium that established and operated Motor Vehicle Periodic Inspection (MVPI) station across the country.

I immigrated to the United States and pursued my higher education at George Mason University and earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science in 1999 and continued with MS in Computer Science but dropped out due to personal reasons, later earned MBA from the University of Maryland in 2005, and finishing up MS in Software Engineering in late 2022 and now admitted into the Ph. D. program in Computer Science at George Mason University. In addition, I have attended several professional training and earned certifications such as PMP, AWS, Azure, TOGAF, Systems Engineering, etc.

I have worked at various American and international companies for over 30 years, both large and small, and operated my own Information Technology consulting business Bithop Systems (www.bithop.com) for 12 years supporting Federal agencies. My LinkedIn profile can be found at https://www.linkedin.com/in/sohailshaikh/.

My interests are wide and deep overlapping professional and personal life—including but not limited to computer programming, systems engineering, electronics, aerospace, reading, history, politics, religion, traveling, cooking, and others. Besides my professional work in software engineering and system architecture, aviation and space exploration fascinated me since my childhood, first Apollo missions and Lunar landing, then Space Shuttle program, Voyager, Hubble, JWST, etc. I always wanted to learn to fly airplanes, and that opportunity came in 2013 when I took up flying and earned my wings as a Private Pilot. At the same time, I got interested in learning aircraft design and decided to build legendary Burt Rutan’s composite Long-EZ pusher canard airplane as per his published plans.

In my professional career, I designed, programmed, implemented, and maintained large data processing systems for commercial enterprises and the Federal government. My current professional, academic, and personal interests are high-performance computing (HPC), large scalable data processing systems and performance engineering, Artificial Intelligence specifically Deep Learning/Neural Networks, and the application of AI/ML in aviation.

I am married, have two teenage daughters and live in Virginia with a dog and a cat.