Samir Iqbal, PhD, PE

About

Four perspectives on the research university: faculty member, department chair, federal program director, and associate dean.

A decade building a research program and teaching engineering students, a term leading an engineering department, four years deciding which early stage technologies the federal government would back, and now building the research enterprise of a growing college.

I am the inaugural Associate Dean for Research and a Professor of Computer Science in the College of Computing at Grand Valley State University. From 2021 to 2025 I served as a Program Director in the Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (TIP) at the U.S. National Science Foundation, on an Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) assignment from UT Rio Grande Valley. Before that I spent ten years on the faculty of the University of Texas at Arlington in Electrical Engineering and Bioengineering, held an adjunct appointment in the Department of Urology at UT Southwestern Medical Center, and chaired the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UT Rio Grande Valley, with a joint appointment in its School of Medicine.

I also co-founded two companies based on my laboratory's research. Neither became a sustainable business, but both taught me important lessons about the challenges of translating university research into the marketplace. I took those lessons to NSF in 2021, shortly before the CHIPS and Science Act created the TIP directorate, and saw from the funder's side how more than 200 institutions organize, fund, and advance research.

Leadership

Building programs that did not exist before.

My approach to academic leadership is grounded in faculty success, strong academic programs, student opportunity, institutional partnerships, and responsible stewardship of resources.

Grand Valley State University. As the college's first Associate Dean for Research, I helped grow annual research proposal submissions more than six-fold in two years, from $3.3 million to $21.2 million. The means were plain ones: a proposal calendar, a nine-month Research Academy, red-team reviews, and one-to-one mentoring. In 2026, nine junior faculty submitted NSF CAREER proposals and seven submitted NSF Engineering Research Initiation proposals. I built a joint Computing and Nursing seed grant program in which every team pairs faculty from both colleges, led a statewide AI workforce hub proposal joining six universities, and designed the college's engagement with Michigan Central in Detroit. I played a major role in the Van Andel Institute agreement behind the university's first PhD program, the PhD in Computing, and I am part of the leadership team establishing the AI Research and Innovation Institute (AIRII). I also founded the Grand Rapids DeepTech Pitch Competition, which has engaged more than 50 startup and research teams and sent four of them on to NSF I-Corps training.

National Science Foundation. I managed a $177.6 million portfolio of 433 awards at more than 200 institutions, across six programs: SBIR/STTR, Partnerships for Innovation (PFI), Mid-Career Advancement (MCA), Open Source Ecosystems (POSE, now PESOSE, and Safe-OSE), and Industry-University Cooperative Research Centers (IUCRC). PFI alone included more than 350 awards in 45 states. I chaired the NSF-wide working group that designed the Translation to Practice (TTP) program, which made its first awards in October 2026, and served on the working group that shaped NSF X-Labs. I 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, and secured TIP's first EPSCoR co-funding. I reshaped APEX into NSF's first supplement dedicated to patent costs on NSF-funded inventions, aimed at universities without strong technology transfer offices. I awarded more than 20 INTERN supplements, which place graduate students on PFI projects in industry and other non-academic internships, and I coached my awardees to bring competitive requests. I also served on national searches for TIP program directors.

Semiconductors and photonics. At NSF I led the SBIR/STTR portfolio for semiconductors, photonics, and IoT: 56 startups and about $20 million, half of it in chips and photonics, from gallium oxide power devices to silicon photonics lasers. I represented NSF at the Department of Energy workshop on chiplets for high performance computing and advanced sensors, and in 2024 worked with Taiwan's science agencies and semiconductor industry to widen access to fabrication and prototyping for NSF-funded startups and researchers.

UT Arlington and UT Rio Grande Valley. At UT Rio Grande Valley, one of the nation's largest Hispanic-serving institutions, I chaired the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, led about 40 faculty and staff, worked on ABET program assessment, and directed a new program in sustainable energy and water resource management. At UT Arlington I joined a five-person nano-bio cluster hire, directed a federally funded doctoral fellowship program in bioengineering, served as a Presidential Research Fellow, was a founding faculty mentor of the Start-Up Lounge, and received the College of Engineering's Excellence in Research Award. Across three universities I have chaired or served on searches that hired more than 30 faculty.

Curriculum and student opportunity. I have worked on curriculum development and engineering education throughout my career. At Grand Valley I co-designed a three-course entrepreneurship sequence, and an experiential learning model in which mixed-major student teams work on real projects with industry and community partners from the first semester to capstone. Earlier I introduced courses in bio-nanotechnology, biosensors, nanoenergy, and research methods, co-taught Introduction to Engineering to first-year students for four years at UT Arlington, served on the undergraduate curriculum committee there, and worked on ABET program assessment as a department chair. In 2017 the Tarrant County Asian American Chamber of Commerce gave me its Education Award for encouraging students to pursue higher education.

AI in teaching. A university cannot put brakes on AI, but it can provide a steering wheel. I favor clear rules by level: limited where students first learn core concepts, expected in advanced courses and research, and always with a person accountable for the result. AI is a good assistant for faculty and staff, and the expert remains the person.

The common thread is putting structures in place so that faculty can compete for larger and newer funding, students learn through curriculum innovation, experiential learning, and industry-connected opportunities, and industry is part of the research team rather than a name on a letter of support.

Research

My research has been in semiconductor devices, nanoscale biosensors, solid state nanopores, and the electrical detection of cancer at the single cell level. More recent work is in quantum machine learning, quantum networks, and AI. The through line is building things that detect what could not be detected before, and then asking whether anyone outside the laboratory would use them.

That work has produced more than 60 journal papers, including in Nature Nanotechnology, Lab on a Chip, Cancer Research, Biosensors and Bioelectronics, Applied Physics Letters, and Scientific Reports; four issued U.S. patents; more than $5 million in funding from NSF, NIH, industry, and foundations; and an NSF CAREER award on my first submission. I am a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, a member of the National Academy of Inventors, and a Senior Member of IEEE. 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 11 doctoral dissertations and more than a dozen master's theses. My doctoral graduates include an NSF CAREER awardee, an NIH MERIT awardee, and a department chair, and former students work at Intel, GlobalFoundries, and Texas Instruments. That part of the record matters more to me than the publication list.

I have served on doctoral and thesis committees at universities across the United States and internationally, and I have reviewed tenure and promotion cases for thirteen universities.

Speaking, Professional Leadership and Service

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 TEDxUTA.

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, and received the TIP Directorate's Excellence Award at NSF in 2023. I serve on the editorial boards of Scientific Reports and three other journals, and I have reviewed grant proposals for funding agencies in five countries.