Salah Harb · Ph.D.
// research fellow · florida institute of technology · 2026

Salah Harb
hardware, photons, & signals.

I build low-latency systems where silicon meets physics — FPGAs for cryptography and imaging, GPUs for real-time fiber-optic sensing, and cloud platforms for scientific data that used to live on lab benches.

based
Melbourne, FL
role
Research Fellow, CMDS Center
prev
LBNL · Concordia · MDA
email
salah.sa.harb@gmail.com
fig.01 — ofdr/fpga pipeline t = realtime · <10 ms RFSoC 4x2 fiber·FUT laser·TLS
about

A short bio.

Engineer by training, experimenter by habit. I like systems where the cost of being wrong is measured in nanoseconds.

I'm a Research Fellow at the Computational Mathematics & Data Science Center at Florida Institute of Technology, where I'm building an AI-assisted, cloud-native repository for medical imaging data on top of AWS S3 and Databricks.

Before that I spent two years at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory designing a high-resolution Optical Frequency Domain Reflectometry (OFDR) platform — GPU-accelerated, FPGA-synchronized, <10 ms latency — for distributed temperature and strain sensing. My Ph.D. at Concordia was on secure, lossless image steganography with hardware co-design on Zynq-7000 SoCs.

I'm originally from Irbid, Jordan, did my graduate work in Montreal, and now live in Florida. Outside of work I enjoy building PCs, cooking Italian and Middle-Eastern food, long drives, beach time, and adventure & mystery novels.

current & recent work

What I'm building.

Three threads running in parallel: scientific cloud platforms, real-time photonic sensing, and hardware-accelerated security.
01 · 2026 →

AI-assisted medical imaging repository

florida tech · cmds center · aws / databricks

Cloud-native platform with natural-language dataset discovery, extensible analytics workflows, and user-defined containerized pipelines under reproducible governance.

cloudai/mlhealthcare data
02 · 2024–2026

Real-time GPU-accelerated OFDR

lbnl · atap · cuda / cupy / rfsoc 4x2

End-to-end distributed fiber-optic sensing with an integrated auxiliary interferometer, sub-10 ms feedback loop, and custom FPGA IP for acquisition, FFT, and PCIe offload.

photonicsgpufpga
03 · 2019–2024

Hardware-accelerated steganography & crypto

concordia · zynq-7000 / gf(2ⁿ)

A secure, lossless image-steganography model with pipelined FPGA realization, plus reconfigurable cores for AES, ECC over GF(2ⁿ), and Paillier — optimized for real-time embedded deployment.

securityfpgasignal proc.
04 · 2022–2023

Satellite payload control, CanadaARM

mda · montreal · vhdl/verilog

RTL modules and verification benches for aerospace-grade payload control — timing, redundancy, and fault-tolerance under mission constraints.

aerospacertlverification

All research & projects

interests

Technical interests.

Keywords I'd tag myself with. Some are stable threads; some I'm actively exploring.
hardware acceleration fpga prototyping optical frequency domain reflectometry fiber-optic sensing gpu & cuda high-performance computing signal processing · fft · hilbert image steganography symmetric & asymmetric crypto zynq-7000 / rfsoc 4x2 / pynq high-level synthesis axi / dma / pcie wireless sensor networks m2m · 6g neural networks
gallery

Lab, field, & off-hours.

Placeholders for now — swap in real images when you have them.
off-hours

Outside the lab.

Outside of work, I enjoy shopping, trying new restaurants, watching movies, long drives, beach time, reading adventure & mystery novels, building PCs, gaming, and cooking Italian and Middle-Eastern dishes — with frequent detours into Thai and Japanese food too. Evening walks are a staple.

I have roots in Irbid, Jordan, did my graduate work in Montreal, and am now based in Florida.

contact

Say hello.

I'm always up for a chat about FPGAs, photonics, or moving scientific workflows to the cloud without losing the scientists.