For someone facing brain surgery, a few millimeters can matter. Doctors need to know not only where a seizure begins but also which surrounding tissue controls functions such as language and must be protected.
A new collaboration between NYU Abu Dhabi and Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi is investigating some of those questions. Using magnetoencephalography, or MEG, which records the tiny magnetic fields generated by brain activity, researchers are studying people with epilepsy during sleep and while they respond to sounds, images, and language.
MEG Research Instrumentation Scientist Hadi Zaatiti plays a key role in this work. Supporting research in the University’s MEG lab, he spent months preparing protocols for epilepsy participants, culminating in the first participant’s arrival on campus in October 2026.
The research could ultimately help build a more detailed picture of an individual patient’s brain before surgery, helping doctors identify where seizure-related activity originates and which nearby areas responsible for functions such as language need to be protected.
The work is currently for research rather than clinical diagnosis or treatment, but Zaatiti hopes it can eventually bring the findings closer to patient care.
“Research is a start,” he says. “Hopefully later we might have more collaborations where we can actually help and have an impact on their lives.”
A new field to master
The ambition reflects a striking change in direction for an engineer whose career began with autonomous vehicles, aircraft, and drones.
Growing up in Lebanon, Zaatiti was fascinated by computers, spending hours programming websites or taking the machine apart to understand what was happening inside. He studied electrical engineering at the Lebanese University before moving to France, where he completed a master’s in system architecture and embedded systems at CentraleSupélec and École Polytechnique and a PhD in computer science at Université Paris-Saclay.
After his PhD, Zaatiti worked on autonomous vehicles before moving into aerospace, where he designed aircraft and drones. By the time an opportunity at NYUAD arose, he was working at Airbus in France.
His route to NYUAD began with a postdoctoral position in which he applied artificial intelligence to Arabic pronunciation under Professor Nader Masmoudi. The research used MRI to examine how the vocal tract moves as different sounds are produced, introducing him to medical imaging.
Six months later, Osama Abdullah, director of Core Technology Platforms (CTP), encouraged him to take on the University’s MEG lab. Neuroscience was a new discipline for Zaatiti, so he trained in MEG, EEG, and MRI while bringing an engineer’s instinct for understanding complex systems.
That growing expertise also began to shape his own research. Working with two generations of MEG technology, Zaatiti compared how the systems performed and developed an algorithm to improve the calibration of newer sensors, making their measurements more accurate.
Now, that combination of engineering and neuroscience is being put to a very different test.
Reading the brain’s signals
Led by CTP director Abdullah, the study involves eligible adult patients from Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi participating in on-campus research.
The first study is recording brain activity while participants sleep. Other experiments will examine responses to sounds, faces, houses, and Arabic words.
MEG can detect the abnormal spikes in brain activity associated with epilepsy. When those spikes repeatedly originate from the same area, researchers can investigate their source.
Language raises a different question. For patients who may later undergo surgery, clinicians need to understand what functions are performed by tissue around the affected area.
For Arabic-speaking patients, that means testing language in Arabic rather than relying on tasks designed for English speakers. Participants will distinguish between real and invented Arabic words while researchers observe which brain regions respond. Zaatiti believes even dialect may influence how language is represented, something the research could explore further.
The team also hopes to compare MEG recordings with data from electrodes implanted in some patients as part of their hospital care. This would allow researchers to compare what MEG detects from outside the skull with measurements taken directly from the brain.
Engineering with a human purpose
Zaatiti now wants to deepen his expertise in neuroimaging and reconnect it with artificial intelligence, exploring how AI might help researchers extract more information from data produced by technologies such as MEG and MRI.
After a career spanning autonomous vehicles, aerospace, AI, and neuroscience, he wants to build deep expertise in one field without losing the engineer’s instinct to make something work better.
The difference now is what is at stake. The systems he is trying to understand are no longer vehicles or aircraft, but human brains, and the problems he hopes to solve could one day influence decisions made for individual patients.
“I want to focus on a specialty, build that well, and dedicate myself to research,” he says. “I want that research to go somewhere. I want it to help doctors, to help patients, and to have an impact on real people.”
