Amina Qutub, Ph.D.
The Burzik Professorship in Engineering Design
The Burzik Professorship in Engineering Design was established in 2013 with a gift from the Catherine and Francis Burzik Foundation. Funding for this position is used to support the research and teaching of engineering design to nurture student-developed technology ventures and train the next generation of engineering business leaders.

Amina Qutub, Ph.D.

The Burzik Professorship in Engineering Design

Associate Professor, Biomedical Engineering and Chemical Engineering

Amina Qutub’s research interests include systems biology, neurovascular regeneration, computational modeling and artificial intelligence. Her work seeks to eradicate hematological and neurological diseases by understanding how human cells communicate during processes of growth and repair.

She is principal investigator of the Qutub Lab, a systems biology research lab that analyzes the design principles, rules and decisions behind human cell communication during cell growth. Qutub is also a member of the UTSA Brain Health Consortium, a collaborative team that uses transdisciplinary approaches to advance the basic understanding of the brain in order to prevent and treat the most debilitating brain disorders.

Qutub has an h-index of 23, with nearly 2300 citations to date. She has published more than 60 research articles in refereed journals such as Nature Methods, Nature Biomedical Engineering, Molecular and Cellular Biology, and the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazine. Her work has received more than $3 million in competitive grant funding from organizations like the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative.

In 2021, Qutub was inducted into the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) College of Fellows for contributions to her field. The college represents the top 2% of medical and biological engineers in the United States. She is also a recipient of the prestigious NSF CAREER award and the Bioinformatics Peer Prize. 

Outside of her research lab, Qutub serves as the research thrust lead for UTSA’s MATRIX AI Consortium and is the former director of the UTSA­–UT Health biomedical engineering graduate program. Additionally, she has worked as co-chair and organizer of the National Academies Frontiers of Engineering Symposia. She is also a member of the standing committee on biotechnology capabilities and national security needs within the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine.

Qutub earned her doctorate in bioengineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a Ruth Kirschstein National Research Service Award Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. She served on the faculty at Rice University before joining UTSA in fall 2018.