Friend,

As Arab American Heritage Month draws to a close, I want to take this last chance to acknowledge the incredible events that have taken place across the country this month celebrating our people and culture, as well as the inspiring work of Arab Americans who serve their communities, provide for their families, and make this country a better place.

We are delighted to share our final feature for the month highlighting the work of Fadel Adib [[link removed]] , an Associate Professor at MIT and innovator in the field of computer science and technology. Be sure to read about the life-changing contributions he has made to address health and environmental issues.

And thank you all for following along as we lifted up Arab Americans making big waves this past month! We hope you will continue to support our work and consider making a donation [[link removed]] to allow us to sustain our fight for Arab American representation and the protection of our civil rights and liberties.

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"Please, make this a product and put it here." That is what innovator Fadel Adib was told by his grandmother in Lebanon when he described creating a device that could use Wi-Fi signals to track people's movement and she saw an important application for herself: if she fell in a room, it would detect her fall and send a message to one of her children. Like Fadel, she immediately understood the potential for technological advances to improve real-world experiences. Using technology to turn obstacles or barriers into mediums for communication, those are just some of the amazing solutions coming out of Fadel Adib’s work.

Born in Lebanon just a year before the civil war ended there, Adib studied at American University of Beirut during a time of political violence, including assassinations and car bombings. He arrived in the United States in 2011 to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he would earn both his Masters and PhD in Computer Science. In a feature in MIT’s Technology Review, Fadel noted one of the starkest differences between his experience studying in Lebanon during political upheaval and at MIT: "the first thing that shocked me was that I could focus all the time on research.” And focus, he did. Adib has earned many accolades for his technological studies including the MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 award, the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and the Sloan Research Fellowship. His research was also named as one of the 50 ways MIT has transformed computer science, and he demonstrated his work to President Obama at the White House. In what he calls, "one of the cool highlights of my research," Adel's emotion detection device was the focus of an episode of The Big Bang Theory in 2017 entitled, "The Emotion Detection Automation."

Now, as the Doherty Chair of Ocean Utilization and Associate Professor at the MIT Media Lab and in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Fadel works on creating technology to address societal, industrial, and ecological issues. Fadel’s research has consisted of breaking down how to sense motion using wireless signals, which can be applied in various environments to improve how people in different fields do their work. Currently, his commercialized technologies are used to monitor patients with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Multiple Sclerosis, and COVID19.

Fadel Adib is blazing a trail in the world of technology and science and we are eager to see how his work, and that of other Arab Americans in the field, improve our day to day experiences.

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Arab American Institute Foundation
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