Ziad Ali

Ziad Ali, from Oak Ridge, North Carolina, is pursuing a PhD in electrical engineering at Stanford School of Engineering. He graduated from North Carolina State University (NCSU) with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and biomedical engineering. Ziad aspires to combine electrical engineering with neuroscience to better treat and understand neurological disorders by developing analog circuits to interface with the brain and mimic its functionality. He also aims to create and expand educational STEM opportunities for underprivileged students. He performed research at NCSU in both the iMIST Lab, where he investigated the utilization of ultrasound for non-invasive neuromodulation, and the physics and electrical engineering departments, where he explored prediction schemes for 5G communication systems. Ziad was a student researcher at Columbia University in the Fowler Memorial Lab and interned at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories. At NCSU he founded the education-oriented hackathon PackHacks and created the App Development Club to teach students how to build mobile apps. Ziad is an Astronaut Scholar, Amgen Scholar, and Park Scholar.