After obtaining her BSc. in Electrical Engineering from the American University in Cairo, Nawal received an MSc. in Computational Neuroscience from the Institute for Neuroinformatics (INI) at ETH Zürich. Throughout her Master’s, Nawal developed a passion for acoustics from the work she did with Shih-Chii Liu on speaker tracking using spikes from a neuromorphic silicon cochlea chip. To shift to more clinical research, she did her master thesis in Norbert Dillier’s lab on neural modeling of cochlear implant coding strategies. Currently, Nawal is pursuing her PhD on improving the perception of vocal characteristics by cochlear implant users under the co-supervision of Deniz Baskent and Etienne Gaudrain.