Professor Yasir Suleiman-Malley has vast academic leadership experience in the UK and the Arab World. He is Emeritus Professor of Modern Arabic Studies at the University of Cambridge, formerly His Majesty Sultan Qaboos Bin Said chair of Contemporary Arabic Studies at the University of Cambridge, and Iraq chair of Arabic Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He is Chair of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), Member of the Board of Trustees of the Gulf Research Centre-Cambridge, and a member of the Panel of Judges of the British Kuwaiti Friendship Society Book Prize for Middle Eastern Studies. Professor Suleiman-Malley is a former Vice President and Chair of Council of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, Former Chair of the British Kuwaiti Friendship Society Book Prize, and former member of the Board of Trustees of the University of Edinburgh. Professor Suleiman-Malley is an internationally leading scholar in Arabic sociolinguistics and Middle Eastern Studies. His edited book ‘Being Palestinian: Personal Reflections on Palestinian Identity in the Diaspora’ won the Palestine Book Award, Narrative Section in 2016. The Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh set up graduate awards and prizes in his name in recognition of his significant contributions to both institutions.

Dr. Chunliang Yang is a Research Fellow in the Diabetes Research Center at the Qatar Biomedical Research Institute (QBRI). She earned her Ph.D. in Immunology from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), under the mentorship of Prof. Cong-Yi Wang, a leading expert in diabetes immunology. During her doctoral and master's training at HUST, Dr. Yang specialized in dissecting the immunometabolic mechanisms underlying type 1 and type 2 diabetes, with a particular focus on the pathogenic roles of T cells and macrophages in disease progression.

Dr. Yang is highly skilled in establishing murine models of diabetes and employing advanced techniques in cellular immunology and metabolic phenotyping to investigate disease pathogenesis. Her productive research has led to multiple first-author publications in high-impact journals, including Molecular Therapy, in which her work has elucidated novel mechanisms involving the PDIA3 chaperone function and interferon regulatory factors in diabetes.

At QBRI, Dr. Yang continues to pursue her research interests at the intersection of immunology and metabolic diseases. She aims to further unravel the cellular crosstalk and immunometabolic pathways that contribute to diabetes and related metabolic disorders, with the ultimate goal of identifying novel therapeutic strategies.

Dr Alexei Abrahams blends social science and computer science methods to study asymmetric conflict and information warfare, with particular application to the Palestinian struggle. He is the author of Social Media Exposed, an upcoming book on how to archive and analyze social media data in the public interest. He is also the author of numerous research papers, published at outlets such as the Journal of Information Technology & Politics, Political Science Research & Methods, and the International Journal of Communications. Professor Abrahams holds a PhD in Economics from Brown University, and before joining HBKU was the digital research team lead at McGill University’s Canadian Media Ecosystem Observatory.