Markus Gehring, J.S.D. (Yale), MA (Cantab), LLM (Yale), Dr iur (Hamburg), is the Arthur Watts Senior Research Fellow in Public International Law at the British Institute for International and Comparative Law. He is currently on leave from his tenured position at the Cambridge University Faculty of Law. He is also a Fellow and Director of Studies in Law at Hughes Hall and a Fellow of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law. He has been a Visiting Professor in several law faculties around the world and held a Jean Monnet Research Chair ad personam in Sustainable Development Law at the University of Ottawa Law Faculty in Canada. He is also an affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Land Economy and a Founding Fellow of the Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resources Governance (C-EENRG). He holds a J.S.D. and LL.M from the Yale Law School and a Dr iur from the University of Hamburg and is a member of the Frankfurt/Main and Ontario Bars and an associate member of Landmark Chambers in London, UK. He serves as Lead Counsel for Sustainable Trade, Investment and Finance Law with the Centre of International Sustainable Development Law (CISDL), based at McGill University.

Dr. Yusuf Bicer is an Associate Professor in the College of Science and Engineering at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. He received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering at the Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing, Faculty of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Ontario Tech University, Canada. His PhD thesis investigated photoelectrochemical-based hydrogen and ammonia production options. He completed his BSc in Control Engineering and a master’s in Energy Science and Technology from Istanbul Technical University, Turkey.

His research focuses on utilizing solar energy in various processes, such as effective cooling in greenhouses through innovative approaches, the development of renewable-based integrated energy systems with desalination, carbon capture and conversion, and clean fuel production, including hydrogen and ammonia.

Steven Ratner's teaching and research focus on public international law and on a range of challenges facing governments and international institutions since the Cold War, including territorial disputes, counter-terrorism strategies, ethnic conflict, state and corporate duties regarding foreign investment, and accountability for human rights violations. Professor Ratner is also interested in the intersection of international law and moral philosophy and other theoretical issues. A member of the board of editors of the American Journal of International Law from 1998 to 2008, he began his legal career as an attorney-adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the U.S. State Department. He has since advised governments, international organizations, NGOs, and corporations on a range of international law issues.  Since 2009, he has served on the State Department's Advisory Committee on International Law and since 2013, he has been an adviser to the American Law Institute for the Restatement (Fourth) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States. In 2010–2011, he was a member of the UN's three-person Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka.  He has also served as an expert on international investment law in various arbitrations.  He is a member of the American Law Institute.

Richard Steinberg is Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles; Visiting Professor of Global Studies at Stanford University; and Counselor to the American Society of International Law.

Dr. Steinberg is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Editor-in-Chief of the award-winning http://iccforum.com/,  served on the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law from 2004-2014, and served on the Editorial Board of International Organization from 2003-2012. He has taught law courses at Stanford Law School, the University of California Berkeley (Boalt Hall) School of Law, Sciences Po (Institut d’Etudes Politiques) in France, the University of Coimbra in Portugal, and elsewhere.

Professor Steinberg has written over 40 articles, and edited or co-authored seven books on international law. 

Prior to arriving at UCLA, Professor Steinberg worked as Assistant General Counsel to the United States Trade Representative in Washington, D.C., and later as an associate with Morrison & Foerster in San Francisco. He also served as Project Director at the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy (BRIE) at UC Berkeley.

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.