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 a post-doctoral researcher at Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University. Dr. Ullah 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.

Dr. Abdelalim is an Associate Professor at the College of Health and Life Sciences, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, and a Principal Investigator at Sidra Medicine, leading the Pluripotent Stem Cell Disease Modeling Laboratory. He holds a PhD in medical science from Shiga University of Medical Science, Japan, where he also completed a postdoctoral fellowship and served as an assistant professor.

Before joining Sidra Medicine, he served as a senior scientist at QBRI until February 2024, establishing Qatar's first pluripotent stem cell program dedicated to diabetes research. His team successfully generated multiple iPSC lines from patients with genetic disorders and developed innovative protocols to improve the differentiation of stem cells into pancreatic islets and other cell types.

In addition, Dr. Abdelalim chaired the HSCI-QBRI steering committee, overseeing collaborative diabetes and stem cell research initiatives. He serves on the editorial boards of “Stem Cells Translational Medicine” and “Stem Cells and Development” and has published over 75 articles in prestigious journals. He has received numerous research grants and awards throughout his career.

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.

"QCRI provides an ideal environment to conduct high-impact research which can transcend disciplinary boundaries."

Dr. Ahmad Sami Abushaikha is a founding faculty member. He received his BS in Petroleum Engineering and his BA in Economics from the University of Texas at Austin in 2004. In 2006, he received his MS 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 PhD in Petroleum Engineering from 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.