Rate My Professor Alaa Ahmed

Alaa A. Ahmed is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she also serves as Associate Dean for Graduate Education. She earned a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the American University in Cairo in 1999. She subsequently received an M.S. in Biomedical Engineering, an M.S.E. in Mechanical Engineering, and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2005. Before joining the University of Colorado Boulder in 2008 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Integrative Physiology, Ahmed held a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Michigan and served as a Whitaker Foundation International Scholar and Research Associate at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

Ahmed directs the Neuromechanics Laboratory. Her research focuses on biomechanics, the neural control of movement, motor learning and decision making, and neuroeconomics, using approaches that integrate neuroscience, economics, psychology, and engineering to examine the costs and constraints of human sensorimotor behavior. She was promoted to Associate Professor in Integrative Physiology in 2015 and to Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering in 2020, becoming full Professor in Mechanical Engineering in 2022. Ahmed is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award and a DARPA Young Faculty Award.