Rate My Professor Luis Amaral

Luis A. Nunes Amaral is the Erastus Otis Haven Professor of Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics at Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering, with courtesy appointments as Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Professor of Medicine (Pulmonary and Critical Care). Originally from Portugal, he earned a B.S. in Physics (1990), M.S. in Physics (1992) from Universidade de Lisboa, and Ph.D. in Physics (1996) from Boston University. Postdoctoral fellowships took him to Forschungszentrum Jülich (1995-1996), MIT (1997-1998), and Boston University/Harvard Medical School (1999-2000), followed by a Research Associate position there (2000-2002). At Northwestern since 2002, he progressed from Assistant Professor in Chemical and Biological Engineering to Associate Professor (2009) and Professor (2009), holding professorships in Medicine (2011-2024), Physics and Astronomy (2014-2024), and Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics (2024). He co-directed the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (2013-2023) and was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Early Career Scientist (2009-2015), mentoring over 25 graduate students and 20 postdocs.

Amaral's research explores the emergence, evolution, and stability of complex social and biological systems, focusing on healthcare error mitigation, innovation and creativity, and machine intelligence limits. With over 180 peer-reviewed publications in journals like Nature, Science, PNAS, and Cell, key works include "Aging is associated with a systemic length-associated transcriptome imbalance" (Nature Aging, 2022), "Artificial intelligence needs a scientific method-driven reset" (Nature Physics, 2024), "Robust extraction of pneumonia-associated clinical states from electronic health records" (PNAS, 2024), "A robust data-driven approach identifies four personality types across four large data sets" (Nature Human Behaviour, 2018), and "Adversarial training and attribution methods enable evaluation of robustness and interpretability of deep learning models for image classification" (Physical Review E, 2024). Honors include AAAS Fellow (2012), APS Fellow (2013), AIMBE Fellow (2019), Network Science Society Fellow (2019), W.M. Keck Distinguished Young Scholar (2006), NIH K-25 Career Award (2004), and Provost's Award for Exemplary Faculty Service (2020).