The MD2K Center has not only brought together the top investigators in mobile health, but also a group of dedicated student researchers who will be working with them. This is the first in a series of profiles of the Ph.D. candidates and postdoctoral scholars who are working with the center.
Moustafa Farid Alzantot
Moustafa Alzantot is a native of Tanta, Egypt and currently a first-year Ph.D. student in computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
He also holds a B.Sc. in computer engineering from Tanta University in Egypt and worked as a research assistant at Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology in Alexandria, Egypt. "I find being part of MD2K an astonishing opportunity for various reasons," he said. "Most importantly, the project aims at solving real-world high impact problems in the mobile health domain." The MD2K center brings together a pool of distinguished investigators and active students from a several areas of expertise — including computer science, medicine, and statistics — that are related to the MD2K research, he said. "This will definitely empower our team to tackle the challenging problems we are trying to solve," Alzantot said. His areas of interest are mobile computing, mobile sensing and "how to make useful inferences from sensor-rich mobile devices while, at the same time, preserving users' privacy. Alzantot said he is looking forward to seeing the MD2K develop sensors and software that realize the "vision of P5 medicine" (predictive, preventive, personalized, participatory and precision medicine) when deployed in the field and through user studies. "I also hope to interact closely with the team researchers and my student peers, to learn more from them, he said.