Profiles

Professor Salama received his B.S. (Hons.) degree from Cairo University, Egypt, in 1997. He obtained his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University, U.S., in 2000 and 2005, respectively.

The principal investigator of the KAUST Sensors Lab, Salama joined the University in 2009. From 2009 to 2011, he served as the founding program chair for Electrical Engineering at KAUST. Before joining KAUST, he worked as an assistant professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, U.S., from 2005 to 2009.

Dr. Salama—a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)—has authored 360 articles and holds 50 patents on low-power mixed-signal circuits for intelligent, fully integrated sensors and nonlinear electronics, particularly memristor devices.

His work on complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensors for molecular detection has been funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He is also the co-founder of Ultrawave Labs, a biomedical imaging company.

Salama received the Stanford-Berkeley Innovators Challenge Award in Biological Science.

Professor Salama’s research interests cover various interdisciplinary aspects of electronic circuit design and semiconductor fabrication. He is actively engaged in developing devices, circuits, systems and algorithms to enable inexpensive analytical platforms for a variety of industrial, environmental and biomedical applications.

Salama’s most recent research has focused on developing neuromorphic circuits for brain emulation.

• Developing Biosensors to detect biomarkers for cancer and other ailments.
• Studying electrochemical characteristics of various materials, polymers and films.
• Designing wearable, point-of-care, biotech medical devices.
• Utilizing machine learning to aid in sensing and data interpretation.

Li Zhang received the B.S. degree in microelectronic science and engineering from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China, 2018 and the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia, 2019.

Li Zhang is interested in quantized neural networks, neural network accelerator and software/hardware co-design.

Olga Krestinskaya received her M.Sc. and B.S. degrees from Nazarbayev University in 2016 and 2018. Olga was working as a Teaching Assistant (2017-2018) and Research Assistant (2016-2019) and was involved in several projects connected to hardware implementation of neuromorphic architectures. In 2018, Olga was undergoing a research internship under the Erasmus Student Mobility Program in  FCT/UNL NOVA University in Portugal. In 2017 and 2019, Olga was an intern in Kaust under the supervision of Prof. Khaled Salama.

Olga is the recipient of the 2019 IEEE CASS Pre-doctoral award. She has published several high quality works in the area of analog memristive neural network designs including CNN, LSTM, BNN and HTM. She is a reviewer and author to several top IEEE journals and conferences.

• Developing Biosensors to detect biomarkers for cancer and other ailments.
• Studying electrochemical characteristics of various materials, polymers and films.
• Designing wearable, point-of-care, biotech medical devices.
• Utilizing machine learning to aid in sensing and data interpretation.