{"id":1496,"date":"2019-03-14T09:04:59","date_gmt":"2019-03-14T13:04:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ece.ncsu.edu\/?p=232742"},"modified":"2019-03-14T09:04:59","modified_gmt":"2019-03-14T13:04:59","slug":"brain-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/my.ece.ncsu.edu\/communications\/2019\/brain-power\/","title":{"rendered":"Brain Power"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Like a lot of graduating seniors at NC State, Ziad Ali is looking to the future \u2014 but not just to commencement or his first job after college. He knows what he wants to accomplish decades from now, by the end of his career.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy goal is to make a circuit that can be implanted in the brain that can completely replace the functionality of a low-level portion of the brain, like motor control,\u201d he says. \u201cSo, for example, if you damaged a part of your brain in an accident, the circuit could replace the damaged section entirely.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ali, who will graduate in May with a double major in electrical engineering and biomedical engineering, can focus on his future with certainty thanks to opportunities he\u2019s worked hard to seize since high school. The latest, a coveted Knight-Hennessy Scholarship<\/a>, opens the door to a full ride at Stanford University, where he\u2019ll pursue a Ph.D. in electrical engineering this fall.<\/p>\n

Electrical engineering wasn\u2019t always in the plans for Ali, who grew up in the small town of Oak Ridge, North Carolina, outside Greensboro. \u201cBoth my parents are engineers and I wanted to make my own path,\u201d he says. \u201cFor a while, I wanted to be a chef.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then inspiration struck when he had the opportunity to attend a four-week summer program for high school students interested in STEM subjects \u2014 science, technology, engineering and math. At Summer Ventures, Ali built a solar tracker using an open-source programmable microcontroller called an Arduino. You might say the experience made a light bulb come on for him.<\/p>\n

\u201cBeing able to work on an independent project and discover things myself and then to have something work at the end, that was kind of an \u2018Aha!\u2019 moment,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

He took the project to the next level in his senior year of high school, when he redesigned the device using analog circuits. \u201cThere was no microcontroller, no programming, just hardcore circuits,\u201d he explains. \u201cWhen it worked, I thought, OK, I can actually do this.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Park Scholarship<\/a> gave Ali the chance to attend NC State with a cohort of students united by a passion for service and learning. \u201cThe students in my class have been my best friends and collaborators for the past four years,\u201d he says. \u201cI live with seven of them now. We’ve bounced tons of ideas off of each other, and they’ve helped me grow. They’re all passionate about changing the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

The four-year scholarship, which covers tuition and fees, housing, food, books, travel costs and personal expenses, includes a wealth of leadership opportunities. \u201cThe economic freedom provided by the Park gave me the chance to do so many different things,\u201d Ali says. \u201cNot having to work a part-time job to pay off student loans allowed me to invest my time in research, internships and extracurricular activities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Engineering Meets Medicine<\/h2>\n

While the Park Scholarship sweetened the deal, Ali was primarily drawn to NC State for the quality of its engineering programs, especially its groundbreaking research in power electronics and wearable health-monitoring devices. In the iMIST Lab<\/a>, Ali found a home among a team of researchers exploring the intersection of engineering and human health. It opened the door for Ali to work on one of the most complex challenges in both medicine and engineering: neurological disorders.<\/p>\n

\u201cBasically, the brain is the biggest analog circuit ever,\u201d Ali says. \u201cSo the brain presents a lot of opportunities to match the physical circuit side with the biological side, and see where they intertwine.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Ziad
Ali is carrying 19 credit hours this semester as he prepares to graduate with a double major in electrical engineering and biomedical engineering.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

iMIST stands for \u201cintegrated microsystems for imaging, sensing and therapy.\u201d Researchers in the lab develop and test tiny devices that can send and receive ultrasound signals. The technology holds promise for helping people suffering from neurological disorders such as epilepsy. People with Parkinson\u2019s disease, for example, may someday wear microdevices on the outside of their heads, benefiting from a noninvasive alternative to the electrodes now implanted in some patients to deliver deep brain stimulation.<\/p>\n

Since joining the iMIST research team during his sophomore year, Ali has thrived, developing his skills as an engineer and a researcher. He credits the lab\u2019s director, professor Omer Oralkan, for nurturing his progress.<\/p>\n

\u201cI owe Dr. Oralkan a lot,\u201d he says. \u201cHe meets with me every week, and he\u2019s given me projects over the years to help me develop my skills as an electrical engineer. He always includes me in the group meetings so that I know what’s going on with the research at a much higher level than my particular task.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ali has also worked with physics professor Hans Hallen and engineering professor Alexandra Duel-Hallen to learn more about signal processing. \u201cWe\u2019ve been working on a software simulation using low-frequency signals to predict sudden changes in high-frequency, 5G signals,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s been incredibly useful because when you\u2019re developing circuits for neural applications \u2014 like brain stimulation \u2014 there are so many neural signals that have to be processed.\u201d<\/p>\n

On top of his classwork and research projects on campus, Ali has worked summer internship at some of the nation\u2019s top research labs, including Sandia National Laboratories, the Olson Lab at Columbia University and the MIT Lincoln Laboratory.<\/p>\n

Inspiring Minds<\/h2>\n

He\u2019s also pursued a personal passion, working with the nonprofit Neighbor to Neighbor program and a team of fellow NC State undergraduates to give youngsters in the Triangle\u2019s low-income communities hands-on training in computer science and other STEM disciplines. Ali says it\u2019s been one of the most challenging \u2014 and rewarding \u2014 experiences he\u2019s had since coming to NC State. <\/p>\n

\u201cGetting to know the kids has been awesome,\u201d he says. \u201cBut we\u2019ve had to completely rewrite the curriculum. We thought we\u2019d have the kids making their own programs by the end of the first semester. Now we\u2019re just trying to get them comfortable with the idea that they can do these things by themselves, and to get them thinking about the kinds of problems they\u2019d like to solve.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ali can relate to the kids\u2019 dilemma. When he first came to NC State, he had a much more limited focus than he does today.<\/p>\n

\"Close
Ali’s work on circuits in high school helped spark his interest in electrical engineering.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cWhen I was a freshman, I wasn\u2019t sure I was going to go to graduate school,\u201d he says. \u201cI thought I was going to make the next big app and then sell it for a billion dollars or something. Then I came to the realization that it\u2019s hard to break into that field with something that is both highly impactful and technically complex enough to be proprietary.\u201d<\/p>\n

While he continued to work in app development and even founded a hackathon at NC State called PackHacks, Ali began to rethink his path.<\/p>\n

\u201cI figured a better use of my time would be to focus on developing fundamental technologies without necessarily focusing on making money,\u201d he explains. \u201cThere are a lot of successful apps that don\u2019t solve important problems. I want to solve problems that change people\u2019s lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prepared by his research and studies at NC State and equipped with a Ph.D. from Stanford in a few years, Ali will have the rest of his life to make that vision his legacy.<\/p>\n

This post was originally published<\/a> in NC State News.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"\"Ziad Ali aspires to combine electrical engineering and neuroscience to treat disorders such as epilepsy and Parkinson’s. The NC State senior heads to California in the fall to pursue a Ph.D. at Stanford thanks to a Knight-Hennessy Scholarship.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ncst_dynamicHeaderBlockName":"","ncst_dynamicHeaderData":"","ncst_content_audit_freq":"","ncst_content_audit_date":"","ncst_content_audit_display":false,"ncst_backToTopFlag":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[179],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"displayCategory":null,"acf":{"ncst_posts_meta_modified_date":null},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.ece.ncsu.edu\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.ece.ncsu.edu\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.ece.ncsu.edu\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.ece.ncsu.edu\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.ece.ncsu.edu\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1496"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/my.ece.ncsu.edu\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1496\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2639,"href":"https:\/\/my.ece.ncsu.edu\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1496\/revisions\/2639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.ece.ncsu.edu\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.ece.ncsu.edu\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.ece.ncsu.edu\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}