How would you summarize HBKU’s first 10 years?

We take pride in what we have accomplished in our first 10 years. We have succeeded in building competitive, relevant, and impactful academic and research programs to support Qatar in addressing its challenges, achieving its national vision, and enhancing the lives of our local, regional, and global communities. Our achievements were made possible by our excellent students, faculty, researchers, and staff working together on a broad spectrum of academic and applied research areas across our six colleges and the three research institutes.

What are your hopes for HBKU’s next 10 years?

We remain committed to continuing on our trajectory of excellence and thereby ensuring our success for the future. We aspire to be an outstanding university by providing high quality education and innovative research. We will continue to build a strong intellectual foundation for our researchers, faculty and students to explore and discover new knowledge and to generate new innovative ways to tackle the challenges facing our rapidly changing world. HBKU will continue to serve the country and its national vision by building future leaders focused on the pursuit of knowledge dissemination, building sustainable economic growth, and enhancing the quality of life and well-being of our citizens.  

HBKU is playing a huge role in supporting Qatar’s research aspirations. How proud are you of HBKU’s national research endeavors?

We are very proud of what we have achieved in such a short time, despite many challenges. Our faculty and researchers are being recognized as highly significant innovators, thought leaders, and entrepreneurs, as demonstrated by their publications in leading journals, inventions, patents, prestigious awards for research and academic excellence, success in securing external grants both nationally and globally, and extensive local and international collaborations with world-leading entities and organizations. In addition, there is now a trajectory of producing ideas and licences that have been commercialized and new companies have started based on these innovations.