Taan ElAli

Taan S. ElAli, Ph.D., is a full professor of electrical engineering since 2002. While on a two-year sabbatical leave, he has served as the curriculum committee chairman of the new College of Engineering at King Faisal University (KFU) from August 2008 to August 2009. During this first year, he wrote the electrical engineering curriculum, the common core course requirements for all engineering programs, and the academic quality assurance plan for the entire college curriculum. During the second year of the leave, ElAli was responsible for the implementation of the college of engineering quality assurance plan and served as the electrical engineering department chair.

Dr. ElAli has worked full-time at several academic institutions for more than 23 years in the areas of curriculum development, accreditation, teaching, research, etc. Dr. ElAli has discovered a new approach to dynamic system identification. Dr. ElAli has contributed many papers and conference presentations in the area of dynamic systems and signal processing. In his efforts to revolutionize the engineering education, Dr. ElAli has developed a new approach to Electrical Engineering education. This approach has led, among others, to the restructuring of one of the major courses in the engineering curriculum and thus to the restructuring of the textbooks used for the course. From this restructuring, two textbooks have emerged for the first time in the history of engineering education: "Continuous Signals and Systems with Matlab" and "Discrete Systems and Digital Signal Processing with Matlab." Universities like Rochester Institute of Technology, University of Texas at San Antonio, The University of Georgia, etc. have come onboard to use these textbooks. He has taken the PBC approach to engineering education one step further and introduced an engineering program on Student-Focused Learning through Project-Based Curriculum. Dr. ElAli has contributed a chapter to the well-known "The Engineering Handbook" by CRC press, another to the well-known "The Electrical Engineering Handbook", by Francis and Taylor Press, and another two to "Advances in Systems", and "Computing Sciences and Software Engineering", by Springer, Germany, 2006 and 2007 respectively.