People Biography

Dr. Omar Al-Ahmad is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering specializing in medical robotics and intelligent biomedical systems. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electromechanical engineering from KU Leuven, where he also earned his doctoral degree, developing intelligent catheterization tools for cardiovascular interventions that integrate novel sensors, actuators, and mathematical models through close clinical collaboration.

His industrial experience includes four years at an international fiber-optics firm, where he advanced optical shape sensing and multi-core fiber technologies for major medical device companies. During his postdoctoral fellowship, he expanded into neurovascular stroke technologies while actively pursuing commercialization from startup initiatives and investor pitching to stakeholder engagement across the MedTech ecosystem. He is an inventor on several international patents.

As an early and highly involved faculty member in a newly established Biomedical Engineering program, he made significant contributions to teaching, mentorship, and curriculum and program development. He currently continues to pursue innovative research and teaching, while maintaining close medical collaborations and a commitment to technology transfer. His research interests include continuum robotics, fiber-optic and multimodal sensing, computational mechanics, physics-informed machine learning, smart actuation, and force-aware autonomous navigation with haptics.