Mahdi Al-Husseini

About Mahdi Al-Husseini

Mahdi Al-Husseini was born in Makkah, Saudi Arabia and is of Palestinian and Egyptian heritage. Mahdi was raised in suburban Atlanta, Georgia and spent many childhood summers in his father’s hometown of Qatanna on the outskirts of Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank. Mahdi is an active-duty captain in the US Army where he serves as an aeromedical evacuation officer (67J) and an HH-60M Black Hawk helicopter pilot-in-command. The text in the Holy Quran, roughly translated into English: “he who saves a life, saves all mankind,” inspired his career decision to fly medical rescue missions. He has logged 800+ flight hours in 20+ models of aircraft and possesses FAA commercial ASEL/S, AMEL/S, and CFI-I/I ratings. Mahdi researches artificial intelligence techniques that help evacuate patients and save lives on the battlefield. 

Mahdi received a BS in biomedical engineering, a BS in public policy, and an MS in computer science from Georgia Tech, and an MS in aeronautics & astronautics from Stanford. His operational experiences spurred him to develop analytical methods and advanced algorithms to optimize medical evacuation systems by reducing patient transport times to hospitals. Mahdi is a PhD student at the Stanford Intelligent Systems Laboratory (SISL) and has more than six first-author papers published in venues that include the Journal of Aerospace Information Systems, Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence conference proceedings, the Air Medical Journal, and the Army War College’s Parameters.

Mahdi is a registered patent agent, licensed professional engineer, and inventor with 30+ patents and patent applications, several of which have been acquired by the military and industry. He received the Major General Greene Innovation Award for inventing a helicopter hoist stabilization system for medical evacuation missions and the XVIII Airborne Corps Dragon Lair Award for inventing an artificially intelligent aircraft maneuver training tool. Mahdi’s military unit, Lightning DUSTOFF, was recognized with the Airbus Robert M. Leich Army Aviation Award for a military exercise he organized that—in a first—applied artificial intelligence techniques to dispatch medical aircraft to moving watercraft to facilitate patient handovers between distant islands.  

Mahdi’s career aspiration is to lead a multi-disciplinary engineering team making field-defining technical contributions to rotary-wing flight test and evaluation.