Aline Eid and Asim Gazi recently participated in workshops geared toward developing and diversifying the next generation of academic leaders. They are both Ph.D. students in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Georgia Tech. 

Both Eid and Gazi were chosen to participate in the NextProf Nexus Workshop. This event was held October 4-7 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and was sponsored by Georgia Tech, the University of Michigan, and the University of California, Berkeley. NextProf Nexus is part of a nationwide effort to strengthen and diversify the next generation of academic leaders in engineering, and it is designed to give participants the opportunity to explore and prepare for faculty positions in academia.

Eid was also selected to take part in MIT EECS Rising Stars 2021, which is open to graduate students and postdocs of underrepresented genders. This event was held October 14-15 in a virtual format. Rising Stars was launched in 2021 to identify and mentor outstanding electrical engineers, computer scientists, and artificial intelligence and decision-making engineers and scientists interested in academic careers.  

Eid has been enrolled in the ECE Ph.D. program since 2017, when she joined the ATHENA Group, led by Manos Tentzeris, who is the Ken Byers Professor in Flexible Electronics. She received her B.Eng. and M.S. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Notre Dame University, Louaize, Lebanon and the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, in 2015 and 2017, respectively.

Eid's research is centered around harvesting 5G energy to wirelessly power ultra-low power devices. She was the first to propose unconventional fully-printed structures to enable batteryless devices with breakthrough wireless capabilities, by combining knowledge in electromagnetics, antennas, RFIDs, signal processing, and materials science. Eid has received more than 12 awards and is an inventor on 4 patents. She has been featured in more than 40 news outlets, and is an author/co-author of more than 35 conference and journal papers and book chapters. 

Gazi has been enrolled in the ECE Ph.D. program since 2018. He has been a member of the Inan Research Lab since summer 2019, and he joined the Sensory Information Processing Lab this past summer. Gazi is co-advised by Omer Inan, who is the Linda J. and Mark C. Smith Chair in ECE, and ECE Professor Christopher Rozell. He graduated in May 2018 with his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Dallas.

Gazi’s research revolves around the monitoring, modeling, and modulation of stress by keying into the responses of the "fight or flight" and "rest and digest" branches of the autonomic nervous system. He specifically leverages multimodal physiological sensing and biosignal processing; dynamical systems, machine learning, and feedback control; and non-invasive vagus nerve stimulation (nVNS). His Ph.D. efforts will culminate in algorithms that estimate and react to an individual's latent "stress state" using a diverse set of observable physiological measures, such as heart rate and respiratory timings, to enable closed-loop nVNS to attenuate hyperarousal accompanying panic attacks and trauma recall. 

Gazi received the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in 2020. He has also won several best paper and presentation awards at conferences, and he has received several honors for his work as a graduate teaching assistant.