misc

Hi! My name is Syed Fahad Sultan (Native Urdu: سید فہد سلطان). The pronunciation, as per the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), is as follows sæjjɪd fah(aː)d solˈtˤɑːn. Most students call me “Dr. Sultan” (Pronounced: Sool-tahn 🔈).

I am originally from Lahore, Pakistan (Fun fact: Population of Lahore > Population of New York City) and joined Furman University in Fall 2022 after earning my Ph.D. in Computer Science from State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Fresh out of college, I worked as a professional video game developer for a startup that later got acquired by the Japanese gaming giant DeNA. During this time, I 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.

I then went on to work at Technology for People Initiative, an applied research lab in my where I 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, I 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, I moved to Mecca, Saudi Arabia to work for the GIS Innovation Center (now Wadi Makkah). There I 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 my PhD, Fahad worked at the intersection of computational neuroscience, bioinformatics and machine learning. My work focused on identifying neurological and genetic biomarkers linking type-2 diabetes with cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer’s and other dementias.

1. Video games developer	2. City Planner	3. Neuroscientist

My teaching assistant is Mister Cat.