Case Summary:

North America Immigration Law Group was hired by a lead research technician holding a Ph.D. in machine learning and medical imaging from Egypt to assist him in filing an I-140 NIW(National Interest Waiver) petition. Built on his solid credentials, he seemed to be a noble candidate to secure a national interest waiver. After we consented to the terms of our retainer agreement, we began preparing his petition packet.

According to the matter of Dhanasar (The analytical framework for assessing eligibility for National Interest Waiver), the USCIS needed the following information in our client’s petition packet:

• The foreign national is a member of the professions holding an advanced degree;
• The foreign national proposed endeavor has both substantial merit and national importance;
• The foreign national is well-positioned to advance the proposed endeavor; and
• On balance, it would be beneficial to the United States to waive the requirements of a job offer and thus of a labor certification.

To ensure that our client continues his research work in the U.S., we showed all the 208 citations garnered from the 16 peer-reviewed journal or conference articles (6 of them first-authored) and 1 first-authored arXiv article he published. Also, these articles have been published in highly acclaimed journals in the field of medical imaging, signifying his dedication to this area.

Moreover, we observed that he is also active in the scientific community as a peer reviewer for highly acclaimed journals, and he had already conducted 3 reviews. Only top-level experts in their field are invited to perform this important review work, so this frequent review activity further demonstrates our client’s important standing in the field.

We also acknowledged his work on integrating machine learning technology into medical imaging and its great importance because it expands the interdisciplinary field of radionics, which is the intersection of oncological radiology, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

Moreover, we elaborated on the value and importance of his work as he participated in projects that had received grants from leading agencies. These grants include funding from the largest biomedical research agency in the world and a part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. These grants are reserved for research directly addressing critical problems in medical imaging and therefore demonstrate the importance of our client’s research.

Going forward, it was imperative for us to include the recommendation letters into his petition as our client managed to produce four recommendation letters from fellow recognized experts. One of the recommenders expressed:

“[Client] used this application to identify regions within cancer that contained prognostic influence, allowing for more personalized treatment and prognosis compared to simple staging procedures. His findings are of great importance to clinical cancer care because patients within the same stage of cancer can differ profoundly in their survival, treatment, and recurrence.” 

Despite a long wait, we are delighted that USCIS approved our client’s NIW petition without an RFE (request for evidence), and we truly thank our client for being patient and cooperative throughout the process.