WiSE Gabilan Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Education
- Other, Harvard University
- Doctoral Degree, University of Minnesota
- Master's Degree, University of Minnesota
- Bachelor's Degree, Sharif University Of Technology
Biography
Maral Mousavi joined the department of biomedical engineering at USC in 2019 as an assistant professor. She received her B.S. from Sharif University of Technology and completed her PhD studies at the University of Minnesota. Before joining USC, Maral was a postdoctoral fellow in the research group of Prof. George Whitesides at Harvard University and Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, working on affordable diagnostic devices to make healthcare and analysis accessible to all. Maral’s research experiences and interests span from point-of-care diagnostics, to electrochemical sensors, wearable devices, neural probes, and tools for precision medicine. Her research is focused on addressing health disparities through development of creative tools for diagnostic and mechanistic studies. Maral's creative research and accomplishments are recognized through numerous awards including NIH Director's New Innovator Award (DP2), 3M Nontenured Faculty Award, Research Award from Powell Foundation, Zumberge Diversity and Inclusion Research Award, Grand Prize of the Maseeh Entrepreneurship Prize Competition (MEPC), Provost Strategic Research Award, Stevens Transformational Innovation Award, Pillsbury Mentorship Award from the USC Stevens Center for Innovation, the University of Minnesota Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, Graham N. Gleysteen Fellowship for Academic Excellence, Graduate Student Research Awards from Eastern Analytical Symposium, Young Chemist Runner-up Award (2018), and Graduate Research Award from the Society for Electroanalytical Chemistry. Maral is committed to addressing disparities in graduate education (as well as healthcare). She is the founder of a YouTube channel called “Surviving and Thriving in Higher Education”, dedicated to accessible training tutorials on soft skills, technical skills, and the strategies for maintaining well-being in graduate education. This channel currently has more than 60,000 subscribers.
Research Summary
Maral's research focuses on developing engineered tools for improving healthcare and patient outcomes. She is motivated to develop affordable point-of-care diagnostics to make healthcare accessible to all, and to develop new bioanalytical tools to help unravel the pathophysiology of diseases. The group has four project areas: (i) development of affordable point-of-care diagnostics to make healthcare accessible to all, (ii) development of wearable devices and textile-based sensors for detection of markers in sweat, (iii) use of fluorous compounds as novel materials for designing sensors with improved selectivity and response time, (iv) designing neural probes for in vivo measurement of acetylcholine dynamics in the brain (important in Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative diseases)
