Following his graduation from City College in the fall of 2022, electrical engineering Ph.D. student Hady Moussa started a career at the semiconductor company Qualcomm in San Diego working as a senior engineer, in which he focuses on enhancing and developing wireless concepts.
Hady Moussa
Moussa, originally from Egypt, earned his bachelor’s degree in Egypt with a major in electronics and communication before completing one year of a master’s program in his country, as well. He also joined an industry company called Analog Devices Inc., which builds transceivers. There, he gained experience as an antenna design engineer for two years.
For his Ph.D. program, he was interested in working with Prof. Andrea Alu, whose work he followed closely since his high school graduation.
“It was my dream to work with him, I was watching him on YouTube and reading his papers,” he said. “So, it was just very exciting for me to join him.”
His desire to work in collaboration with Alu and to target a very specific aspect of engineering led him to CCNY in 2018.
Overall, Moussa said he has enjoyed his time at the college and feels that group collaboration, in-depth research, and support from his thesis advisor have prepared him for his new role and shaped the way he approaches life.
Let’s say you’re working on research and things don’t work as you want or that you want to publish a paper, but it gets rejected many times, this continuous self-improvement taught me to keep doing my job no matter what,” he said. “You should not be in a rush to see the results, especially if you are doing your best, try always to learn from your mistakes.
His thesis, “Nonlinear and Time-Modulated Metamaterials: Applications at Microwave Frequencies,” was inspired by a topic that has interested scientists for over six decades — observing a different form of wave reflections, known as temporal.
The concept of the thesis was to look at already proposed ideas in mathematics and simulation and bring new insight and measurement to those ideas.
“In the field, everything is already visited or research is mostly already started, so my role is to bring further computational understanding and have better fabrications,” he said.
Although he has been working for Qualcomm since he graduated last year, Moussa said that academia was a very interesting part of his personal development as an engineer thanks to the renewable nature of thesis research.
The interesting part is that every day you deal with a new problem, a new system, even new applications, that did not exist before,” he said. “It does not make you bored in any way because it does not end. It does not have a limit.
Lylia Saurel is a writer for the RICC and recent graduate from Baruch College, where she was awarded Institutional Investor in Journalism. She holds an AA in Writing and Literature and a BA in Journalism and Intercultural communications. She is a former reporter for Dollars & Sense and copy editor for The Ticker. Her work has appeared in The Ticker, D&S Magazine, Daily Planet online edition and others. In addition to written journalism, she enjoys photojournalism and the visual arts.