The Queen’s community is remembering Sameh Sorour, an assistant professor in the School of Computing who died on Oct. 6. He was 41.

Dr. Sorour arrived at Queen’s in 2019 and in that time became a well-respected and well-loved member of the School of Computing and had an impact on colleagues and students alike. His research interests involved the broad areas of advanced communications, networking, computing, and learning technologies for intelligent, autonomous, and cyber-physical systems. He successfully attracted research funding from a variety of sources including NSERC, OCI, Ericsson and Kings Distributed Systems.  

Dr. Sorour was a senior IEEE member and an editor for the IEEE Communications Letters and the IEEE Canadian Journal on Electrical and Computer Engineering. He was a prolific author with 50 journal publications in top tier journals.

“Sameh was a wonderful scholar, instructor, mentor and colleague” says Hossam Hassanein, Director, School of Computing. “His passing is a big loss to Queen’s, the School of Computing and to the scientific community.”

Dr. Sorour received his B.Sc. (2002) and M.Sc. (2006) degrees from Alexandria University, before earning his PhD from University of Toronto in 2011. His PhD thesis was nominated for the Governor General’s Gold Medal Award. His PhD advisor, Shahrokh Valaee, says that he was the best student he had in his group in Toronto.

Dr. Sorour then obtained a MITACS postdoctoral industrial fellowship to work as an industrial researcher at Siradel Canada in conjunction with the University of Toronto. In 2012 he moved to Saudi Arabia for a year-long postdoctoral research fellowship at King Abduallah University of Science and Technology. He then worked as a lecturer at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (2013-2016) and as an assistant professor at University of Idaho (2016-2019). 

Dr. Sorour was married with two young daughters.