Course options and career paths for Engineering and IT students: A Talk by the University of Sydney

Professor Assaad Masri has received his PhD and BE Honours with the University Medal from the University of Sydney. He is currently a Professor in the School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering, Faculty of Engineering at the University of Sydney and Chairman of the Australia and New Zealand section of the Combustion Institute. Between 2011 and 2016, he has held a prestigious Australian Professorial Fellowship awarded by The Australian Research Council. Masri has published over 200 journal papers and won many awards including the prestigious Silver Medal of Combustion Institute and the Jurgen Warnatz Gold Medal of the Combustion Institute. He was elected Fellow of the Combustion Institute in 2017 and has served as Program Co-Chair for the 36th Symposium in Seoul, 2016.

Professor Masri’s research lies in the broad area of efficient energy conversion technologies with a focus on sustainability and decarbonization. He has led pioneering research in the turbulent combustion of gaseous fuels, dilute and dense spray flames, and atomization processes. His innovations in the design of burners that embody specific research issues such as turbulence-chemistry or droplet-turbulence interactions has advanced knowledge in these fields and continues to serve industry in the development of future combustors of green fuels.

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Hesham El Gamal received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Maryland at College Park, MD. He currently serves as the Engineering Deputy Dean and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at the University of Sydney, Australia. Prior to that, he served as the Chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and the Co-Director of the Institute of Cybersecurity and Digital Trust (ICDT) at the Ohio State University (2018-2021). He served as a member of the faculty at the ECE department of the Ohio State University from 2001 to 2018. He co-founded inmobly inc., a venture-backed spinoff from the Ohio State University pioneering the use of AI technology in multi-media delivery, and served as its Chief Executive Office from 2012 to 2018. He also served as Acting Vice President of Research at Nile University, Cairo, Egypt (2015-2017) and has held visiting appointments at UCLA and Institute Eurecom. His prior industrial experience spans positions at Alcatel-Lucent and Hughes Network Systems.

Prof. El Gamal was recognized as one of the top 1% highly cited and most influential researchers by the ISI web of science (2014-2017). He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (2019) and the IEEE (2010), a recipient of the OSU Innovator Award (2013), the OSU Stanley E. Harrison Award (2008), the National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2004), the OSU College of Engineering Lumley Research Award (2002), the OSU Electrical Engineering Department FARMER Young Faculty Development Fund (2004-2008), and Hughes Network Systems Annual Achievement Award (2000). He holds key intellectual property in the area of proactive communications, space-time coding/decoding, and graphical code design. He has serves on various editorial boards and conference committees, such as Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Communications, Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, Guest Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory special issue on cooperative communications, Member of the SP4COM technical committee, Co-Chair of the Globecom'08 communication theory symposium, and Co-Chair of the 2010 IEEE Information Theory Workshop.