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.

A decade building a research program and 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 Industry Partnerships 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 at the U.S. National Science Foundation, on an Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) assignment from UT Rio Grande Valley. Before that I built a research program at the University of Texas at Arlington, 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.

Semiconductors have been a thread through all of it. My research is in semiconductor devices and nanoscale sensing. At NSF I ran the SBIR/STTR portfolio for semiconductors, photonics, and IoT: fifty-six startups, about $20 million, half of it in chips and photonics, from gallium oxide power devices to silicon photonics lasers. I also represented NSF at the Department of Energy workshop on chiplets for HPC and advanced sensors, played a major role in developing NSF collaboration with Taiwanese partners under the CHIPS Act, and was part of the working group that shaped NSF X-Labs.

Leadership

Building programs that did not exist before.

Grand Valley State University. As the college's first Associate Dean for Research and Industry Partnerships, I helped grow annual research proposal submissions from $3.3 million to $21.2 million by building proposal development support and mentoring faculty in competitive grant writing. I played a major role in the Van Andel Institute partnership behind the university's first PhD program, the PhD in Computing, and I am part of the team standing up the AI Research and Innovation Institute (AIRII), where foundational AI meets biomedical discovery. I also founded the Grand Rapids DeepTech Pitch Competition.

National Science Foundation. I made 433 funding decisions across 204 institutions in 46 states and territories and managed a portfolio across six programs, including SBIR/STTR, Partnerships for Innovation (PFI), Mid-Career Advancement (MCA), Open Source Ecosystems (POSE and Safe-OSE), and Industry-University Cooperative Research Centers (IUCRC). 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. My PFI portfolio produced 26 research grounded companies, and I funded 56 startups through SBIR and STTR.

University of Texas. At UT Rio Grande Valley I chaired the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and started a new program in sustainable energy. At UT Arlington I directed a federally funded doctoral fellowship program run jointly with UT Southwestern Medical Center, and co-founded two companies out of my own laboratory.

The common thread is putting structures in place so faculty can compete for larger and newer funding, students have a path from the laboratory to companies and graduate study, and industry is a real partner rather than a donor.

Research

My research career has been in semiconductor devices, 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, four 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.

Speaking 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 TEDx.

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 Scientific Reports and three other journals, and I have reviewed grant proposals for funding agencies in five countries.

Advisory Work

Alongside my university role I take a small number of independent advisory engagements, through AMCO VIBES LLC, on federal funding strategy and program design, research translation, and expert review process design for funders, accelerators, and prize competitions.

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.