Dr. Bantekas is a Professor of Transnational Law (with an emphasis on sports law, contracts, arbitration and international law) at HBKU and Adjunct Professor of Law at Georgetown University and Senior Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies of the University of London. He has advised international organizations, including UN, CoE, IDEA, OIC, UNDP and is regularly appointed as arbitrator in international commercial disputes. He was appointed to the list of arbitrators of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in 2023 and advises private entities and national federations on various regulatory and contractual aspects of sports law. He has authored more than 200 peer reviewed articles, including in the American Journal of Int’L; British YB Int’l L; ICLQ; European J Int’l L; Human Rts Quarterly; J Int’l Dispute Settlement; Arbitration Int’l; American Rev Int’l Arbitration; Berkeley J Int’l L; Pennsylvania J Constitutional Law and others. He is the author of 20 books, 13 of which have been published by Oxford and Cambridge University Press.

Hilary Bell teaches construction and infrastructure development law, dispute resolution and legal skills courses. Hilary is an innovative academic leader, she is the JD Degree Coordinator, a member of the Curriculum Committee, and chairing the College's Admissions Committee. As a professor, Hilary complements academic perspectives with that of an experienced practitioner. She has 11 years of professional dispute resolution experience and has practiced in the UK and Qatar.

In addition to teaching, Hilary coaches teams competing in international moot court competitions, including the Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot. Before joining HBKU Law, she was a construction disputes lawyer in Qatar. Before moving to Qatar, she practiced as a litigator in the UK. Hilary is a Solicitor and Notary Public; a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Arbitration; a Member of the International Coach Federation; and a Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

Hilary's scholarship focuses on the application of educational pedagogy to teaching critical areas of law including climate law, dispute resolution, and therapeutic jurisprudence. She regularly trains and coaches practicing lawyers to improve their performance, and has trained the trainers of the Nigerian Institute of Chartered Arbitrators on how to design arbitration training courses.

Dr. Boshmaf received his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of British Columbia under the mentorship of Prof. Konstantin Beznosov and Prof. Matei Ripeanu. His PhD thesis presented one of the first security analyses of malicious social bots on the web.
 

Dr. Firoj Alam is a Senior Scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute. He earned his PhD from the University of Trento, Italy, and has over a decade of experience in Artificial Intelligence, Deep/Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Social Media Content Analysis, Image Processing, and Conversational Analysis. He has published over 100 research papers (including 6 book chapters and 11 journal articles) in international journals, conferences, and notable workshops.

Dr. Alam has served as the lead principal investigator for several funded projects. His current research focuses on large language models (benchmarking, native and cultural alignment), generative AI content detection, disinformation detection, fact-checking, and multimodal propaganda detection. He has also been actively contributing to building a community of researchers in these areas by organizing workshops and shared tasks. Some notable shared tasks include the CheckThat! lab at CLEF, NLP4IF 2021, and several SemEval tasks.

He has significantly contributed to developing AI-based tools and resources to support humanitarian organizations during disaster events and aid the UN-OCHA in streamlining their Education Insecurity efforts. Dr. Alam has served as a program committee member for several top-tier conferences, including ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, ICLR, Interspeech, ICASSP, AAAI, IJCAI, and ICWSM. Additionally, he has reviewed numerous journals, including Computer Speech and Language (CSL), ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing (TALLIP), and PLOS ONE.

Dr. Michaël Aupetit joined QCRI in August 2014. He is a Senior Scientist at the Qatar Center for Artificial Intelligence (QCAI), working on AI foundation models design and analysis, and applying his research to health and material sciences.

Before joining QCRI, Michaël worked for 10 years as a research scientist and senior expert in data mining and visual analytics at CEA LIST in Paris Saclay, where he designed decision support systems to solve complex industrial problems in health and security domains.

Michaël initiated and co-organized 5 international workshops. He has been a PC member of IEEE VAST, EuroVis, EuroVA, PacificVis, ESANN, and ICANN conferences, and is a regular reviewer for IEEE TVCG, and the Computer Graphics Forum journal. He has published over 100 scientific papers and holds 6 US, 3 WO, and 1 EP patents. He obtained the Habilitation for Research Supervision (HDR) in Computer Science from Paris 11 Orsay University in 2012, and the PhD degree in Industrial Engineering from Grenoble National Polytechnic Institute (INPG) in 2001.
 

Yifan Zhang has 20+ years of experience in research and development in speech and language-related products. Before joining QCRI, he built an information discovery engine for news discovery for Wavii (Google), developed a speech recognition engine serving millions of customers for Nuance and Autonomy. In QCRI, as part of the QCAI team, he works on Fanar, QCRI’s Generative AI project on text, speech, and image.
 

Dr. Ehsan Ullah is post-doctoral researcher at Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University. Dr. Ehsan received his Ph.D. degree in 2014 from Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts. He received his M.Sc. and B.Sc. from University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore. Ehsan Ullah is interested in health informatics, computational biology, genomics and algorithms.

Mr. Mohamed Eldaw Graduated from Sudan University of Science and Technology with a Bachelor's degree in Medical Laboratory Science (Microbiology) in 2006 and a Higher Diploma from Institute of Endemic Diseases-University of Khartoum in 2007. He served in various positions beginning with the Military Hospital in Sudan until he joined Shafallah Medical Genetic Center in 2010, where he worked until 2014 as a Research Assistant in Molecular Genetic Department. During this period he was involved in many projects including (Gene identification in Mendelian forms of Familial Epilepsy) and (Autosomal Recessive diseases) and the internal CAP accredited Diagnostic Laboratory. In 2014, he joined QBRI as a Research Associate in the protein laboratory.

Currently, Eldaw works with Dr. Kolatkar and is involved as a team member in various studies including mechanistic analysis of transcription factor networks involved in pluripotency and β islet cell development using a variety of methods. This includes Protein expression & purification, Bioreactor, CD, ITC, MALS, as well as X-ray crystallography. He has also helped with the techniques in biochemistry and molecular and cell biology course by assisting faculty with supervising students.

Dr. Ahmad Sami Abushaikha is a founding faculty member. He received a B.S. in Petroleum Engineering and a B.A. in Economics from University of Texas at Austin in 2004. In 2006, he received a M.S. in Reservoir Geosciences and Engineering from "Institut Français du Pétrole". From 2007 to 2009, he worked at TOTAL Research Centre at Pau, France and at Qatar Petroleum. In 2013, he received his Ph.D. in Petroleum Engineering from the Imperial College London. From 2015 to 2017, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stanford University specializing in discretization schemes for fluid flow in porous media.

Dr. Julie Decock received her Master of Science (MSc) in Biomedical Sciences from the Free University of Brussels (VUB, Belgium) and completed her Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Medical Sciences at the Catholic University of Leuven, KU Leuven, Belgium. Her doctoral research focused on the cancer degradome, the repertoire of proteases in the tumor microenvironment that contribute to shaping the extracellular environment and modulating pericellular signaling, thereby affecting tumor progression and clinical outcome.

She joined QBRI in 2013 and established a research program in the areas of tumor antigen discovery and tumor immunity, two key research areas that can help accelerate breast cancer research and advance the development of new treatments. Currently, her research focuses on cancer testis antigens, a group of tumor associated antigens that play pivotal roles in tumorigenesis and progression, and display high tumor specificity with minimal on- and off-target side effects. Her efforts have demonstrated that cancer testis antigens not only play important roles in multiple cancer hallmarks but can also serve as tumor specific molecular targets and modulators of anti-tumor immunity, offering diverse opportunities for anti-cancer targeting.

Dr. Decock is currently a scientist at the Translational Oncology Research Center, Qatar Biomedical Research Institute (QBRI), and a joint Assistant Professor position at HBKU’s College of Health and Life Sciences (CHLS).