Dr. Fawwaz Habbal is the Executive Dean for Education and Research and Senior Lecturer at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). Dr. Habbal joined Harvard Engineering in 2002 as the Associate Dean for Academic Planning and was instrumental in the development of the intellectual direction for bioengineering and EE at SEAS. In 2007, he became the Executive Dean of SEAS. One major interest of his has been expanding the curriculum that enables students’ creativity and entrepreneurship. This includes the conception and development of the collaborative Master’s in Design Engineering with the Harvard Graduate School of Design, launched Fall of 2016. He teaches courses in design engineering, electrical and mechanical engineering, nanofabrication, NMES, photonics devices and microfluidics. He is a member of the Applied Physics research group at SEAS, and is the Director of the Graduate Engineering Studies.

Prior to joining Harvard, Dr. Habbal worked in industry and became Senior Research, Engineering Fellow, and Corporate VP at Polaroid Corporation. At Polaroid, he was responsible for research and product design. He was also tasked to develop the electronic imaging business group. After leaving Polaroid, he established 3 start-ups in electronic imaging for the mobile market.

Dr. Habbal has significant publications in materials science, electronics, imaging and nanophotonics. He did postdoctoral research in Raman spectroscopy at the University of Colorado and was senior research fellow at Harvard before his industrial career. Dr. Habbal earned a BS in Mathematics, PhD in Physics and has several business degrees.