Dr. Rose T. Faghih is an assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Houston where she directs the Computational Medicine Laboratory (CML). She received a bachelor’s degree (summa cum laude) in electrical engineering (Honors Program Citation) from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2008, and S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science with a minor in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2010 and 2014, respectively, where she was a member of two research laboratories: Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at MIT as well as the Neuroscience Statistics Research Laboratory, an interdisciplinary lab at MIT and the Massachusetts General Hospital. During her Ph.D. studies, by developing a new model and algorithm that combines a minimal physiological model with compressed sensing techniques, she answered an important question in neuroendocrine data analysis, namely, determining the timing and amplitude of hormone secretory events from concurrent time series of pairs of pulsatile endocrine hormones whose interactions are controlled through feedback loops. Moreover, she devised an optimization formulation that characterizes the pulsatile control underlying cortisol secretion (a stress hormone), which can potentially have therapeutic applications in bio-inspired optimal treatment of some endocrine disorders.

From 2014 to 2016, she completed her postdoctoral training at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT as a member of the Neuroscience Statistics Research Laboratory. Her research interests are in control, estimation, system identification, and modeling neural and physiological systems in health and disease, personalized medicine, and biomedical data science with a focus on neuroendocrine hormones.

Dr. Faghih has won multiple awards, including the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, an MIT Graduate Fellowship, the University of Maryland President’s Scholarship, and the University of Maryland’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Chair’s Award. In 2016, Dr. Faghih was selected by IEEE-USA and DiscoverE as one of the “New Faces of Engineering” for her work on neuroendocrine hormones. She has also been inducted into various honor societies including Phi Kappa Phi, Tau Beta Pi, and Eta Kappa Nu. Dr. Faghih has been writing poetry since first grade, and has published two poetry books. She also enjoys creating digital arts, and has exhibited her artwork at the MIT Graduate Art Soiree.