El-Samad grew up in Lebanon. She was one of four girls. Her mother was a math teacher and her father worked in retail. El-Samad was an undergraduate student at the American University of Beirut, where she studied the concepts of mathematical modeling.[10][11] She became interested in control theory and moved to the United States as a graduate student at Iowa State University.[12] El-Samad eventually obtained her doctorate in Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara under the supervision of Mustafa Khammash.[13] For her doctoral research she studied control theory, and how systems such as robots and cruise control handled sudden changes.[13] She became increasingly interested in the complexity of biological systems, and switched her research focus to gene regulatory systems and the shock responses that bacteria undergo when adapting to temperature changes.[10] After graduating, El-Samad was appointed as a Sandler Fellow at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).[13]
Research and career
El-Samad was appointed to the faculty at the University of California, San Francisco. In 2013 she was awarded a $1.4 million grant from the Paul Allen Family Foundation to study cellular networks.[13] These cellular networks rely on rapid communication and information transfer. Temperature variations of 2 °C can cause considerable changes in the information sent from a cell to a gene. Specifically, El-Samad has studied how these changes are encoded within cells, such that the correct information is shared with genes. El-Samad studies the Protein kinase A (PKA) system, which is able to transient several environmental signals.[14]
