I’m a condensed-matter physicist. I use quantum mechanics and first-principles (density-functional) calculations to understand how low-dimensional materials — graphene, carbon nanotubes, and engineered structures like graphene nanomeshes and other 2D crystals — behave, and how they might be put to work in electronics, sensing, energy, and medicine.
I’m an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Physics in the Faculty of Basic Sciences at the German University in Cairo. I earned my PhD in physics at the University of Pennsylvania (2002), where I worked with Charles Kane and Eugene Mele on the electronic structure of carbon nanotubes. Since then I’ve worked across academia and industry — as a visiting scientist in Computational Materials Science at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and in research and faculty roles at the Egypt Nanotechnology Center (Cairo University), Zewail City of Science and Technology, and Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University — before joining GUC. I also work at the applied edge of computing: I designed and built Quantum Text, a machine-learning engine for clustering and categorizing text, now used across industry and government.
Away from the department I keep up a few hobbies — observational astronomy, running, ping-pong, and gardening. I spent about fifteen years living in the United States. And I love cats: several of them share my desk and consider the keyboard theirs. Now and then I also write about things in the world that seem to me worth questioning — you’ll find those under Writing.
This site is a quiet corner of the web: my research, publications and patents, and occasional notes on what’s happening in the world. No trackers, no ads, no comment section — just the writing.