A trustee since 2020 and an Ì©¹ú²ÊƱgraduate (BE '98), El-Samad is the Senior Vice President and Director of the Institute of Computation at Altos Labs, where she is also a Founding Principal Investigator. She is the former Kuo Family Endowed Professor and Vice Chair in the department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco and the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3). She was elected an AIMBE fellow in 2020 and selected as a senior investigator of the Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub in 2017, a Paul. G. Allen Distinguished Investigator in 2013, a recipient of the Donald P. Eckman Award in 2012, and a 2009 Packard Fellow. El-Samad is active in efforts to encourage more women to pursue scientific careers, serving on UCSF's diversity committee. She is a graduate of Iowa State University (MS, '99) and UC Santa Barbara (PhD, '05).​