Salam Daher Wins Tech Innovator Award for Healthcare Simulation

Salam Daher, assistant professor of informatics, this week received the Society for Simulation in Healthcare's Technology Innovator of the Year award in recognition of four projects addressing patient simulation.

Daher joined NJIT's Ying Wu College of Computing in 2019 to continue her research at the intersection of computing and healthcare simulation, education and practitioner. She's been working on a patient simulator combining physical and virtual elements, a remote interactive video simulator, digital assistants as customizable patients and new ways to measure wounds in 3D. 

"[The award] means a lot to me because I am working in the healthcare simulation area in computing … and SSH is the largest and only organization that provides certificates in that domain," Daher said. "I knew I was being nominated. There are other people in the field that have more experience than me."

"My background is officially computer science but I'm very multidisciplinary. My Ph.D. was in modeling and simulation … the applications have been with people in healthcare," Daher explained. COVID-19 has made such research especially timely, she noted.

Daher currently teaches IT-201, Information Design Techniques, and said she'd eventually like to create a new course focusing on her simulation niche.

She has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Center for Women and Information Technology, and various specialty groups for computer simulations. She's currently applying for a new grant from the National Institutes of Health.

The award was presented in Los Angeles at the society's annual conference, the International Meeting on Simulation in Healthcare, and was accepted on Daher's behalf by her nominator and former University of Central Florida colleague Laura Gonzalez. Daher's Ph.D. student Dahlia Musa also attended.

Daher and Gonzalez may one day see their work become commercially available. Daher recently joined the advisory board of Sentinel U, which is a software company in Waterbury, Conn. focusing on medical applications. Gonzalez became a vice president there in spring 2021.