Profiles

Nazek El-Atab is an assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and the principal investigator of the Smart, Advanced Memory Devices and Applications (SAMA) Lab. El-Atab joined the University in October 2017. She received her B.Sc. in computer and communications engineering in 2012 from Rafik Hariri Canadian University in Lebanon, and her M.Sc. in microsystems engineering in 2014 and Ph.D. in interdisciplinary engineering in 2017 from the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in the UAE, under a cooperative program with MIT and funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research.

Her research focuses on the design and fabrication of multifunctional electronic devices that integrate sensing, memory, and computation, with applications in neuromorphic sensing, intelligent edge systems, and adaptive electronics. Her group develops novel memristive and memory-based devices using emerging materials and soft systems to enable energy-efficient sensing and processing directly at the hardware level.

El-Atab is an IEEE Electron Devices Society Distinguished Lecturer. She serves as associate editor-in-chief of Applied Nanoscience (Springer Nature) and associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, IEEE Electron Device Letters, Nano Select (Wiley) and Microelectronics Engineering (Elsevier). She has published more than 100 papers in international peer-reviewed scientific journals and conference proceedings, authored two books and two book chapters, and holds seven filed U.S. patents.

El-Atab has received several awards for her research, including the 2015 For Women in Science Middle East Fellowship from L’Oréal-UNESCO and the 2017 L’Oréal-UNESCO International Rising Talents Award. She was featured among the 2019 “Remarkable Women in Technology” by UNESCO. She also participated in the 70th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Germany, was selected as a 2020 UC Berkeley EECS Rising Star, named among the MIT Technology Review Arabia “Innovators Under 35” in 2020, recognized among the BCG V60 Women in Sustainability, and selected as a NEOM Changemaker in 2021. She has been listed among the 2023 “Rising Stars” by Advanced Materials (Wiley) and among the 2024 “Emerging Leaders” by the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics (IOP).

Her research has been widely covered in international media, including IEEE Spectrum, National Geographic, BBC, MIT Technology Review, and Sky News Arabia.

Professor El-Atab’s current research focuses on designing and developing innovative smart memory electronic devices for futuristic in-memory sensing and computing applications. El-Atab and her team aim to enhance an increasingly digitized world for emerging applications like artificial intelligence, IoT and augmented reality.

Dr. Dayanand Kumar is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the SAMA Laboratory, KAUST. He received his M.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Varanasi, India, and his Ph.D. from National Chiao Tung University (NCTU), Taiwan. During his doctoral studies, he was honored by the President of Taiwan for outstanding academic research performance. Following his Ph.D., he worked as a Principal Integration Engineer at Micron Technology, Taiwan, and subsequently held postdoctoral research positions at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He also served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), Taiwan.

Dr. Kumar’s research focuses on emerging memory devices for in-memory sensing and computing; smart multifunctional optoelectronic synaptic devices - including memristors, transistors, and capacitors - for bionic machine vision and physiological signal processing applications.