Homa Alemzadeh

About

Homa Alemzadeh is a prominent researcher at the intersection of safety-critical systems, cybersecurity, and medical robotics, with particular expertise in robot-assisted surgery and cyber-physical systems. Her landmark 2016 study analyzing 14 years of FDA adverse event data in robotic surgery — now cited over 420 times — established a foundational empirical understanding of failure modes and patient risks in surgical robotics, making it an essential reference for researchers and clinicians alike. Building on this safety-focused foundation, Alemzadeh has made significant contributions to identifying and mitigating cybersecurity vulnerabilities in teleoperated surgical robots, demonstrating how malicious attacks can exploit control system weaknesses during live procedures. Her work extends into runtime monitoring and error detection during minimally invasive surgery, advancing the vision of context-aware, intelligent surgical systems. More recently, she has expanded into cognitive assistants for healthcare, including emergency medical services applications. Across her portfolio, Alemzadeh consistently bridges rigorous systems-theoretic analysis with practical, real-world safety implications — work that has collectively garnered over 690 citations — positioning her as a leading voice in making autonomous and robotic medical systems safer and more resilient.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Adverse Events in Robotic Surgery: A Retrospective Study of 14 Years of FDA Data

   424 citations · 2016
2. 2
   Targeted Attacks on Teleoperated Surgical Robots: Dynamic Model-Based Detection and Mitigation

   87 citations · 2016
3. 3
   A Review of Cognitive Assistants for Healthcare

   68 citations · 2021
4. 4
   Systems-Theoretic Safety Assessment of Robotic Telesurgical Systems

   36 citations · 2015
5. 5
   Safety-critical cyber-physical attacks

   20 citations · 2016
6. 6
   A Behavior Tree Cognitive Assistant System for Emergency Medical Services

   15 citations · 2019
7. 7
   Context-aware Monitoring in Robotic Surgery

   14 citations · 2019
8. 8
   Challenges and Opportunities in the Detection of Safety-Critical Cyberphysical Attacks

   14 citations · 2020
9. 9
   Runtime Detection of Executional Errors in Robot-Assisted Surgery

   10 citations · 2022
10. 10
    Evaluating the Task Generalization of Temporal Convolutional Networks for Surgical Gesture and Motion Recognition Using Kinematic Data

    10 citations · 2023

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links