Samir Iqbal, PhD, PE

About

I have sat on all three sides of the table: the funder's, the founder's, and the reviewer's.

Four years deciding which early stage technologies the federal government would back, a decade building a research program before that, and two companies started out of my own laboratory.

I am Associate Dean for Research and Industry Partnerships in the College of Computing at Grand Valley State University, where annual research proposal submissions have grown by roughly an order of magnitude across two fiscal years. I played a major role in the $12.5 million Van Andel Institute agreement behind the university's first doctoral program, a PhD in AI for Life Sciences, and I am part of the team standing up its AI Research and Innovation Institute.

From 2021 to 2025 I served as a Program Director in the Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships at the U.S. National Science Foundation. I managed a portfolio exceeding $175 million across six programs at once, including SBIR/STTR, Partnerships for Innovation (PFI), Mid-Career Advancement (MCA), Open Source Ecosystems (POSE and Safe-OSE), and Accelerating Research Translation (ART). I built the Translation to Practice (TTP) program from concept through approved solicitation, chaired the working group that brought all eight NSF directorates to shared language, and negotiated the directorate's first co-funding agreements with the U.S. Army DEVCOM Ground Vehicle Systems Center and the Naval Surface Warfare Center at Dahlgren. I established TIP's first EPSCoR co-funding pathway, and I co-created APEX, the first NSF program to cover patent and intellectual property protection expenses for university researchers, which came from watching good academic technologies die for want of a few thousand dollars in patent costs.

Before Washington I spent a decade building a research program at the University of Texas at Arlington and chaired the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UT Rio Grande Valley. My laboratory produced work in top-tier journals, issued U.S. patents, an NSF CAREER award, and two companies I co-founded as technical lead. I know what it costs to move something from a bench to a customer, because I have done it and I know where it goes wrong.

Advisory Work

Alongside my university role I take a small number of independent advisory engagements, through AMCO VIBES LLC, in three areas.

Federal funding strategy and program design

Four years inside NSF making funding decisions on nearly 1,000 proposals across SBIR/STTR, PFI, Mid-Career Advancement, and Open Source Ecosystems. I designed the TTP program from concept to approved solicitation, established TIP's first EPSCoR co-funding pathway, and co-created APEX, the first NSF program to fund patent and intellectual property protection expenses. I work with research teams on program fit and positioning, and with agencies and foundations on designing translation mechanisms rather than simply making grants.

Research translation and commercialization

My NSF portfolio produced 26 research grounded companies, and I funded 56 startups directly through SBIR and STTR. As Associate Dean for Research and Industry Partnerships I have helped grow annual research proposal submissions by roughly an order of magnitude across two fiscal years and founded a regional deep tech pitch competition. I co-founded two companies out of my own laboratory, so when I talk with faculty about commercializing their work I can tell them what it takes and where it goes wrong.

Venture readiness and expert review

At NSF I conducted investment style due diligence on hundreds of early stage companies before federal awards, covering intellectual property strategy, competitive landscape, team structure, customer discovery readiness, and budget integrity. I also organized more than 100 expert review panels and have reviewed grant proposals for funding agencies in five countries. Both translate into diligence preparation for founders and review process design for accelerators, prize competitions, and funders.

I prepare clients to face funders and investors themselves rather than speaking for them, which keeps every engagement cleanly within federal post-employment rules. I do not take engagements involving specific proposals or awards I handled during my NSF service.

Speaking

I speak on research translation, federal funding strategy, deep tech commercialization, and building research capacity at institutions that are not starting from the top of the rankings.

Recent keynotes and invited talks include the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering Languages and Systems, Tech Week Grand Rapids, the US-Taiwan Workshop on DeepTech Innovation and Partnerships in Taipei, the NSF Fall SBIR/STTR Innovation Conference in Austin, and a distinguished seminar at Kansas State University. I have twice served as an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, for the Nanotechnology Council and for the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, and I have spoken at TEDx.

I founded and chair the Grand Rapids DeepTech Pitch Competition, and I chaired Innovation Tank, a Shark Tank style competition at the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers annual conferences. I serve on the editorial boards of Nature Scientific Reports and three other journals, and I have reviewed grant proposals for funding agencies in five countries.

Research

My research career has been in nanoscale biosensors, solid state nanopores, and the electrical detection of cancer at the single cell level, with more recent work in AI applied to speech and to life sciences. The through line is building physical devices that detect something nobody could detect before, and then asking whether anyone outside the laboratory would use them.

That work has produced publications in Nature Nanotechnology, Biosensors and Bioelectronics, Nanoscale, Lab on a Chip, Applied Physics Letters, Biomedical Microdevices, Nanotechnology, and Scientific Reports, issued U.S. patents in nanoscale biosensing, an NSF CAREER award, and Fellowship in the Royal Society of Chemistry. I co-edited Nanopores: Sensing and Fundamental Biological Interactions for Springer. The current publication and citation record is on my Google Scholar profile, and current work is at the Nano-Bio Lab at Grand Valley State University.

I have supervised dozens of doctoral dissertations, master's theses, and undergraduate researchers, along with postdoctoral fellows and visiting sabbatical faculty, and I have served on doctoral and thesis committees at universities across the United States and internationally. Former students are now at Intel and GlobalFoundries and on university faculties. That part of the record matters more to me than the publication list.