Dr. Fahad Saeed
Dr. Fahad Saeed, a Western Michigan University faculty member in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, was named a recipient of the highly prestigious, 5-year, $500,000 CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). He is an assistant professor in both the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
NSF CAREER awards are the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards for junior faculty and these highly selective grants are given to junior faculty members who are likely to become academic leaders of the future. Awardees have the flexibility to explore unexpected new terrain uncovered in the course of their research.
Saeed’s grant will be used to lay a foundation for fast algorithmic and high performance computing solutions suitable for analyzing big proteogenomics data sets. He plans to involve both undergraduate and graduate students in the research, as well as develop an outreach program for K-12 students.
“We are very proud of Dr. Saeed and his accomplishments,” said Dean Houssam Toutanji. “This CAREER Award exemplifies the quality of our faculty here at Western’s College of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Dr. Saeed’s research is groundbreaking and will be important to the fields of computer science and computer engineering.”
Saeed joined WMU in 2014. His research interests include parallel and distributed algorithms and architectures, computational proteomics and genomics, and Big Data problems in computational biology and bioinformatics. He is the director of the Parallel Computing and Data Science Laboratory and the founding co-director of the Center for High-Performance Computing and Big Data at WMU.
Earlier in his career, Saeed was a post-doctoral fellow and then a research fellow in the Systems Biology Center at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He received his Ph.D. in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago. For his exceptional research productivity, he was awarded the Fellows Award for Research at NIH for the year 2012 and Outstanding New Researcher Award at WMU in 2015.