Dr. Omar El-Agnaf is considered a pioneer in the field of Parkinson’s and related neurodegenerative diseases. He was awarded his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Biochemistry in 1997 at Queen’s University Belfast, UK. Between 1997 to 1999, he worked as a postdoctoral scientist at the School of Biology and Biochemistry, Queen’s University Belfast. Following this, Dr. El-Agnaf undertook an additional two-year post-doctoral position at St. George’s Medical School in London. In 2001, he was awarded a Research Fellowship from the Parkinson’s Disease Society-UK to establish his research group at Lancaster University. After completing his Research Fellowship in 2004, Dr. El-Agnaf joined the College of Medicine at UAE University and was appointed to the Biochemistry Department. In September 2014, he joined Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) at Qatar Foundation (QF), and in 2016 he was appointed Acting Executive Director of Qatar Biomedical Research Institute (QBRI), part of HBKU, and became the Executive Director (2018 - 2022).

Dr. El-Agnaf has successfully directed QBRI’s efforts towards translational research to improve and transform healthcare through innovations in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of diseases affecting Qatar and the region. Under his leadership, QBRI has realized significant achievements. This has included securing extramural research funding to establish robust alliances with biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies to winning the 2017 Arab Best Research Institution of the Year Award.

Since his move to the region in 2004, Dr. El-Agnaf has assembled an excellent research team that has positioned itself at the forefront of neuroscience research internationally, building a reputable portfolio in the Middle East and beyond, and has been successful in attracting an array of scientific funding from prestigious international funding agencies. Individually, his discoveries have greatly impacted the scientific research community, provided further insight into the molecular pathogenesis of Parkinson’s disease, and offered new opportunities for the development of novel diagnostic and therapeutic tools for the disease. 

Dr. El-Agnaf is frequently invited as a speaker at international scientific and clinical meetings and is currently a member of the editorial boards of several international journals. Publications in high-ranking scientific journals validate Dr. El-Agnaf's track record of superior basic and translational research productivity. He has published nearly 137 refereed articles, with citations exceeding 13,350 (to date), and possesses an h-index of 61.

Mohammed Shinoy is a Software Engineer at QCRI working on converting research outcomes to production-quality software. He received his Master’s in Mechanical and Mechatronics from the University of Waterloo. 

Dr. Laoucine Kerbache is the Acting Dean for School of Economics and Management (SEM) and Professor of logistics and supply chain management. He is also a Founding Member of the Engineering Management and Decisions Science (EMDS) division in the College of Science and Engineering at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. He holds a PhD, an MSc, and a BSc degree in industrial engineering and operations research from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His research areas span interfaces of industrial engineering, operations research, operations management, logistics, and supply chain management with a special focus on modeling and optimization of problems relative to industrial facilities and service organizations.

Over the last 35 years, Dr. Kerbache has been in academia for 24 years at HEC Paris where he was a Professor of operations management, logistics, and supply chain management. He also held various academic and managerial positions including Associate Dean in charge of the PhD Program, and Dean and CEO of HEC Paris in Qatar.

He has been very active in research theses/dissertations and has published over 150 publications in top-tier international journals and a significant number of academic textbooks. In addition, he is an active member of numerous academic and research professional organizations such as INFORMS, POMS, MSOM, IEEE, EUROMA, IEOM, etc.

Dr. Tareq Al- Ansari is the executive director of the Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute and an associate professor at the College of Science and Engineering at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. He acquired a BEng. in Mechanical Engineering from the University College London, an MPhil in Engineering for Sustainable Development from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD from Imperial College London.

Dr. Bo Wang is an Associate Professor in the College of Science and Engineering at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. He received the B. Eng. degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, in 2010 and the M. Phil and PhD degrees in Electronic and Computer Engineering from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Hong Kong, in 2012 and 2015, respectively.

He worked in RLE, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on low-power graphene-based pressure sensor interface design, in 2016. From 2010 to 2015, he was with the Smart Sensory Integrated System Laboratory (s2is) of HKUST as a research assistant and then a research associate. From 2012 to 2014, he also worked as a mixed-signal IC designer in ZAMI, Hangzhou, to commercialize the chip during his PhD research. Dr. Bo Wang is a member of IEEE (CAS Society and SSCS Society).

He received the Best Design Award at the Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC) in 2016. He also serves as a technical committee member of the IEEE CAS Committee on Sensory Systems and Associate Editor for the IEEE Sensors Journal.

Marco Agus is an Associate Professor in the College of Science and Engineering at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. He obtained an MSc and PhD from the University of Cagliari, Italy. He has also worked as a Research Engineer at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia, and as a Research Scientist at the Center of Research, Development, and Advanced Studies (CRS4), in Cagliari, Italy.

Marco Agus's research interests span different domains in visual computing, from haptics and visual rendering for medical applications to real-time exploration of massive models, to machine learning methods for electron microscopy biology data and indoor environments. He taught courses at several important visual computing venues, including IEEE CVPR, ACM SIGGRAPH, and Eurographics, and he regularly acts as a committee member, reviewer, chair, and associate editor for top journals and conferences in the visual computing domain.

Dr. Adel Elomri is an Associate Professor in the Division of Engineering Management and Decision Sciences at the College of Science and Engineering, Hamad Bin Khalifa University. He holds a PhD and MSc with highest honors in supply chain and operations management from École Centrale Paris (CentraleSupélec), France, and a BS with highest honors in industrial engineering from the National Engineering School of Tunis (ENIT), Tunisia.

Dr. Adel Elomri is a scholar in operations management and supply chains, with expertise and research interests at the intersection of operations research, economics, and sustainability. His research explores how complex supply chains can be designed and managed, and his findings have been widely published, attracting significant funding. Dr. Elomri’s work spans three key areas: sustainable supply chain management, smart supply chains, and healthcare operations management.

Dr. Hira Amin is an Assistant Professor at the College of Public Policy at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. After completing her PhD in History at the University of Cambridge, she has been involved in various interdisciplinary projects. Her research interests broadly fall into two categories: the first is social, cultural, and religious transformations in the modern Muslim world; the second is social inclusion, accessibility, and disability.

She has undergone training in systems thinking, LEGO Serious Play, participatory co-design, and strategic foresight at the Institute for the Future. She is currently working on multiple research grants that utilize these various tools and methods, such as education for sustainability and global citizenship, strategic foresight in culture, identity, and education, and systems mapping the disability diagnostics landscape in Qatar.

Seerin Nizam is a Program Manager at Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) and an Associate Member of the Chartered Accountants of Sri Lanka, the Institute of Public Accountants of Australia, the Institute of Financial Accountants of the UK, and the Institute of Chartered Professional Managers of Sri Lanka. Additionally, he is a Senior Member of the Association of Accounting Technicians of Sri Lanka. Seerin holds a Master’s in Business Administration (MBA) in International Business from the University of the West of Scotland.

With over 15 years of work experience, including 9 years in Qatar, Seerin specializes in budgeting and reporting, financial planning, analytics and strategies, and procurement. Most recently, he served as a Management Accountant within the Budgeting and Reporting team at Qatar Foundation.