Engineering and technology
I am currently a Professor in the American University of Beirut Biomedical Engineering program, which is a joint program between medicine and engineering. The program aims at combining the efforts of two the oldest schools in the region to focus on innovation in the field of Biomedical Engineering solutions with focus on biomedical and healthcare applications. In the past five years, I have been in two institutions, AUB and UC San Diego. In the past two years at AUB I established a group focused on developing micro and nanotechnology to for monitoring and/or modulating function of electrogenic cells in-vitro and in vivo and the design and development of biosensors and lab-on-a-chip platforms for point of care diagnostic purposes. We work with UC Sa Diego, on 3D nanopillars for high density intracellular recording from electrogenic cells. The early technology development produced joint manuscript in Nano Letters (impact factor = 12.219). Also, at AUB, we are collaborating with school of medicine to build a BNP point of care sensor that utilizes technology developed as collaboration between AUB and ASU, which resulted in recent manuscript published in Frontiers of Neuroscience, (impact factor = 5.8). In my time at UCSD, I was hired to lead an effort by the Institute of Engineering and Medicine (IEM)in collaboration with the Jacobs Retina Center in the Department of Ophthalmology and 4 groups at the School of Engineering to produce a high density, high resolution, wireless, long-term nanoengineered visual prosthesis for restoring useful vision in blind patients with degenerative retinal diseases. I wrote and submitted several invention disclosures which resulted in two patent applications, won the QUALCOMM/TATARC wireless health challenge grant to build a prototype of the technology. I also authored several manuscripts and helped found a small company that has licensed my patents from UC San Diego and is currently close to human trials. I am also a consultant for imperative care, where work closely with the company on their noninvasive monitoring wearable device for monitoring stroke biomarkers. I am also a consultant for imperative care, where work closely with the company on their noninvasive monitoring wearable device for monitoring stroke biomarkers.