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  • Executive Leadership

Hana El-Samad, PhD

SVP and Director, Institute of Computation
Hana El-Samad, PhD
"In collaboration with the Altos dream team of scientists, I am hoping to map the homeostatic capacitors underlying cell health, with the goal of rationally engineering them back to healthy function. It is a network maintenance, control and repair problem!"

Dr. Hana El-Samad is Senior Vice President and Director of the Institute of Computation (IoC) at Altos Labs, where she is also a Founding Principal Investigator at the Altos Labs Bay Area Institute of Science.

Prior to joining Altos Labs, Hana was the Kuo Family Endowed Professor in the Department of Biochemistry & Biophysics and deputy-director of the Cell Design Institute at UCSF. She is a control and dynamical systems theorist whose work generated fundamental insights into the principles of precise and robust cellular responses through the use of feedback control. Her recent work pioneered real-time measurement of feedback in living cells, synthetic feedback technologies to program cellular function, and theoretical frameworks to quantify biological homeostasis. Hana is the recipient of many honors and awards including a 2011 Donald P. Eckman Award, 2013 Paul G. Allen Distinguished Investigator, 2017 senior investigator of the Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub and 2020 Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.