Hana El Samad
Kuo Family Endowed Professor and Vice-Chair, University of California San Francisco Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub
Hana El-Samad is the Kuo Family Endowed Professor and Vice Chair in the department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco and the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3). She is a 2009 Packard Fellow and recipient of many honors including the 2011 Donald. P Eckman Award, the 2012 CSB2 prize in Systems Biology and the Byers Award in 2019. She was also named a Paul. G. Allen Distinguished Investigator in 2013, senior investigator of the Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub in 2017, and elected as a fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers (AIMBE) in 2020. Dr. El-Samad joined UCSF after obtaining a doctorate degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara, preceded by a Ms Degree in Electrical Engineering from the Iowa State University, and BA in Electrical Engineering from the American University of Beirut. Dr. El-Samad’s research group seeks to develop technology that can advance our understanding of the complex dynamics of cells, and failure in their circuits that lead to disease. A major current focus of her research is to develop rationally designed, programmable, plug-and-play, cellular recognizance and repair circuits that can be broadly deployed for therapeutic (e.g. live cell-based immunotherapy) and biotechnological (e.g. metabolic engineering and bioremediation) applications.