Rasha Al-attar

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About

Rasha Al-attar is a biomedical engineer whose work sits at the intersection of cardiac electrophysiology, automation, and accessible research tools. Her primary research focus is on developing scalable, high-throughput systems for measuring heart cell activity, with the goal of accelerating drug discovery and disease modeling. Her most notable contribution is the design and validation of a fully-automated, low-cost cardiac monolayer optical mapping robot, detailed in her 2023 paper. This system represents a significant leap forward: by automating the optical mapping process—traditionally a labor-intensive, low-throughput technique—she has made it possible to simultaneously record action potentials and intracellular calcium transients from dozens of samples in parallel. This innovation directly addresses a critical bottleneck in cardiac safety pharmacology, where the need for rapid, reproducible electrophysiological data is paramount. Though early in her career, her work has already garnered attention (3 citations), highlighting its immediate relevance to labs seeking to democratize high-content cardiac screening. Al-attar’s research promises to make sophisticated electrophysiological analysis both affordable and accessible, empowering a wider range of scientists to investigate cardiac disease mechanisms and evaluate new therapies.