Hana El-Samad | AIChE

Hana El-Samad

Vice President and Director of Science Integration, Innovation and Insights
Altos Labs

Dr. Hana El-Samad is Senior Vice President and Director of Science Integration, Innovation and Insights at Altos Labs, where she is also a Founding Principal Investigator. Prior to joining Altos Labs, Dr El-Samad was 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 was a 2009 Packard Fellow and recipient of many honors including the 2011 Donald. P Eckman Award and the 2012 CSB2 prize in Systems Biology. She was also named a Paul. G. Allen Distinguished Investigator in 2013, and senior investigator of the Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub in 2017. 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. Dr. El-Samad’s research group seeks to deliver insights into biological feedback control, unraveling evolutionary successful principles of feedback strategies that are most appropriate for the biological substrate and achieving understanding at the right depth and granularity for forward engineering them with predictable outcomes. A major current focus of her research is to enable measurement of feedback in living cells, synthetic technologies to program cellular function, and theoretical frameworks to quantify biological homeostasis and resilience. Her goal at Altos Labs is to rationally reprogram cells to a state of health and resilience.