Syed Fahad Sultan joined Furman University in Fall 2022. He earned his Ph.D. and Master's degree in Computer Science from State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Fresh out of college, Fahad worked as a professional video game developer for a startup that later got acquired by the Japanese gaming giant DeNA. During this time, he was part of the team that built TapFish, the top-grossing game worldwide, for two weeks in 2011, on both the App Store and Google Play.

Fahad then went on to work at Technology for People Initiative, an applied research lab in his hometown Lahore, Pakistan where he mined social media and cell phone data for proxies of socio-economic indicators that allowed more inclusive policy-making for marginalized communities. During these years, Fahad also dabbled in data journalism and helped organize a boot camp on using data for journalists with the support of the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) and the Knight Foundation.

In 2015, Fahad moved to Mecca, Saudi Arabia to work for the GIS Innovation Center. There he worked on innovative urban sensing techniques for better crowd control during the annual pilgrimage to the city, the largest human gathering in the world every year.

During his PhD, Fahad worked at the intersection of computational neuroscience, bioinformatics and machine learning. His work focused on identifying neurological and genetic biomarkers linking type-2 diabetes with cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer's and other dementias.

The breadth of his experiences in the industry and academia has imbued in Fahad a holistic and integrative appreciation of Computer Science. He intends to transfer this interdisciplinary knowledge at Furman University by teaching to students from diverse backgrounds and empowering them to pursue their own varied future interests. Fahad is also committed to increasing broader participation in Computer Science education and championing greater diversity, equity, and inclusion in the student body as well as faculty.

Education

• Ph.D. Computer Science, Stony Brook University
• M.S. Computer Science, Stony Brook University
• B.Sc. Computer Science, National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences