bio

I arrived in the US at the age of 16 to start college, and since then I've been lucky enough to be living a life I never thought imaginable.

I'm currently Chief of Staff at Arcadia Science, where we work to reimagine how science is done, shared, and applied.

Before joining Arcadia, I was an NIH K00 Fellow at MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research, where I developed new tools to study inhibitory neurons in the brain. I earned my PhD from Virginia Tech's Translational Biology, Medicine, and Health program, mapping neural circuits between the eye and brain. My journey in science started at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where my professor first encouraged me to consider a research career.

Beyond research, I work on transforming how science operates. My focuses here include reimagining how we choose what questions to fund and pursue, how we disseminate research, how we collaborate (with humans and machines), and ultimately what is the relationship between science and society. I write and speak about my thoughts on these subjects as well.

I'm a Syrian immigrant, born in Saudi Arabia to a mother from Damascus and a father from Aleppo. In everything I do, I think globally.

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