Mahdi Al-Husseini and Varun Yarabarla, both graduates from the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, have been named to Georgia Trend magazine’s 40-under-40 for 2020.

Al-Husseini, 24, graduated in 2018 and was commissioned into the Army, where he is an aeromedical evacuations office, piloting Black Hawk helicopters to fly wounded soldiers out of harm’s way. While stationed at the U.S. Army Aeromedical Research Laboratory at Fort Rucker in Alabama, he developed SALUS, an anti-rotational technology that prevents the litter, which holds the wounded soldier, from spinning uncontrollably inflight.

“One of the beautiful things about spending my time with the Army while also being an engineer is that it has allowed me to very clearly funnel those engineering efforts into a very particular cause,” Al-Husseini told Georgia Trend writer Anna Bentley.

Yarabarla, 26, who earned his undergraduate degree in 2016 and is a former Fulbright Scholar, “was in his third year of medical school at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine (PCOM) in March 2020 when he joined Vent-Life, a team of engineers, physicians and innovators developing a low-cost ventilator to use during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond,” wrote Georgia Trend’s Patty Rasmussen. 

Their stories, and 38 others, appear in the 24th edition of Georgia Trend’s 40-under-40, in the October 2020 issue.