Developing smart and efficient systems to tackle high-impact problems, especially in the areas of medicine and health care, is the vision of the new chair of electrical and computer engineering at UAB. Yehia Massoud, Ph.D., says advances in electrical engineering will lead to a variety of novel, practical health-care applications. “Many devices that have been developed for other uses could be applied to medicine and health care,” Massoud says. And because of the close relationship between the School of Engineering and UAB’s academic medical center, “we are in a unique position here to focus specifically on those types of issues.”

Massoud is initiating several research collaborations to develop novel solutions for health-care problems to benefit society, including partnerships with departments in the School of Engineering and the School of Medicine, as well as the Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Prior to coming to UAB, Massoud was on the faculty at Rice University, where his research team worked on a $4-million project for the Department of Defense, developing a system that could convert analog signals to digital signals at a much lower sampling rate than conventional digitizing systems.