Nureldin Mohamed is studying Bioengineering and Computer Science at Harvard.
Long before raising venture capital in Silicon Valley in the USA, conducting research at Harvard, or speaking alongside pioneers in robotics, Nureldin Mohamed was a student at Durban High School (DHS) in Durban, teaching computer science to classmates to address education gaps in technology.
Recognising that many students lacked access to formal computer science education, I, the retired chairman of Iqraa Trust, who sponsored Nureldin during his studies at DHS, invited him to partner with me to launch an initiative at the Iqraa Trust Knowledge Centre to teach coding, programming, and computational thinking to underserved students.
After being admitted to Harvard, Nureldin soon began conducting graduate-level research in Professor George Church's laboratory, a pioneer of modern synthetic biology and a scientist recognised on Time's list of the 100 Most Influential People.
Today, Nureldin is the founder of Lupa Robotics, a Silicon Valley Physical AI company pursuing the most difficult challenge in modern robotics: building a general-purpose intelligence capable of operating any robot, on any task, in any environment. From ChatGPT's mastery of language to the rise of self-driving vehicles, artificial intelligence has advanced rapidly. Yet one challenge continues to elude the field of teaching robots to use their hands. As Elon Musk observed, "Robot hands are by far the toughest engineering challenge."
