Samah El-Tantawy, PhD
Dr. Samah El-Tantawy is currently an Assistant Professor at Engineering Mathematics and Physics Department and also a co-director of the Technical Center for Career Development (TCCD) at Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University. In 2004, she completed her Bachelor degree in Electrical and Communication Engineering, Cairo University. In 2007, she finished her M.Sc. degree in Engineering Mathematics, Cairo University. She completed her PhD in the field of ITS from University of Toronto in 2012. During her PhD research, Samah developed a coordinated traffic signal control system using game theory concepts and multi-agent reinforcement learning approaches (MARLIN) that has been published as a US provincial and PCT international patents.
Since January 2017, Dr. Samah was the PI of a funded project by ASRT developing an adaptive and personalized platform for effective and advanced learning for school students.
Samah won a number of awards/funding/recognitions, including:
2017-2018 Second Place and Silver Medal for ICT R&D Category Award in the 5th Cairo Innovates Conference from the Academy of Scientific Research and Technology, for the project of “Development of an Adaptive Personalized Platform for Effective and Advanced Learning”.
2017 State Encouragement Award Award for Women from the Academy of Scientific Research and Technology
2015 ITS Canada New Canadian Commercial/Industry/Academic ITS Technology/Innovation/R&D Award
2014 University of Toronto Inventor of the Year
2013 IEEE-ITSS Best PhD Dissertation Award, First place
2013 INFORMS George B. Dantzing Dissertation Award, Finalist
MaRS Innovation Proof of Principle (PoP) funding for 2012/2013
Connaught Innovation funding for 2013/2014
She has more than 23 publications (including one patent, 12 international journal publications, and 1 book chapter), with an h-index of 8 and around 700 citations according to Google Scholars.
Lately Samah has developed interest in boosting the role of Women in Education and raising healthy brains through her participation in a number of crash courses, scholarships, and workshops related to: “Promoting and Raising Awareness of Healthy Child Growth and Development (Mentally, Socially, and Emotionally)” .
Samah was the president of the Egyptian Student association at the University of Toronto (ESA-UofT) for 2011, the vice president of the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) student chapter at UofT for 2010 and 2011, an IEEE member, a member in the Women in ITS group (WITS) and IEEE Women in Engineering (WIE), and a friend of the Traffic Signal Systems TRB Committee.She is also a member at Egypt Scholar Inc., an NGO that provide various services related to scientific research and development.