👋 Hello! I'm Omar. At one point I made a living as a software engineer, in the computer graphics / geospatial industry, first at Cesium, then at Snapchat.
Since June 2024 I have been working as a science writer / independent researcher on memetics1. My work is currently funded by a grant from Analogue Group & a grant from Kanro.
I also teach & mentor as a volunteer at CodeDay. And host a monthly "Presentation Night", a non-academic lecture series where anyone in the community is invited to learn something & come teach us.
I live in Ithaca, NY. I grew up in Egypt.
1 It's the science of how ideas spread (comes from "gene" -> "genetics", "meme" -> "memetics"). See:
- Open Memetics R&D - Grant Proposal (December 2024)
- The Human Memome Project (July 2025)
- Users are volunteering their twitter & TikTok data (Sep 2024)
- Academics keep failing to do open memetics experiments (May 2025) - (this is about the University of Zurich scandal)