Omar Muhammad Khan is an Assistant Professor at the College of Health and Life Sciences at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. Dr. Khan completed his Master's in Biochemistry from Karachi University, Pakistan before moving to Sweden where he did a Masters in Molecular Cell Biology from Uppsala University, and then a PhD in the lab of Prof. Martin Bergo, a protein lipidation expert. In Bergo's lab, he identified the biochemical importance of the protein lipidation enzyme GGTase-I in immune cell function. He refuted the popular idea that GGTase-I can be a therapeutic target against inflammatory conditions. 

After finishing his PhD, he moved to The Francis Crick Institute (London) in Dr. Axel Behrens's Lab, where he worked on identifying the posttranslational regulators of a tumor suppressor protein FBW7 and mechanisms of chemotherapy resistance in cancer. Dr Khan’s postdoc work highlighted the importance of protein ubiquitylation and protein turnover in colorectal cancer. He found that FBW7 which is a tumor suppressor, is posttranslationally downregulated in several colorectal cancers. These findings challenge the popular belief that only somatic loss of function mutations can contribute to cancer development.

Dr. Emad El-Din Shahin is a professor and former dean of HBKU’s College of Islamic Studies (CIS), Qatar Foundation (2016-2022). Before joining CIS, he was the Hasib Sabbagh Distinguished Visiting Chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies, a visiting professor of Political Science at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and the editor-in-chief of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Politics. 

Dr. Shahin holds a PhD (1989) from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and an MA (1983) and a BA (1980) from the American University in Cairo. He has taught in leading universities in the United States, including Harvard, Notre Dame, Georgetown, George Washington, and Boston Universities. He also taught at Al-Akhawayn University in Morocco.

His research and teaching interests focus on Islam and Politics, Comparative Politics, Democracy, and Political Reform in Muslim societies. Dr. Shahin has authored, co-authored, and co-edited six books and has more than 50 scholarly publications including journal articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries. His publications include Political Ascent: Contemporary Islamic Movements in North Africa (1998), co-editorship with Nathan Brown of The Struggle over Democracy in the Middle East and North Africa (2010); and co-authorship of Islam and Democracy (2005 in Arabic). He is the editor-in-chief of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Politics (2014) and co-editor with John L. Esposito of The Oxford Handbook of Islam and Politics (2013); Key Islamic Political Thinkers (Oxford University Press, 2018); and Islam and Politics around the World (Oxford University Press, 2018).

Dr. Shahin was nominated for the Harvard University Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize two years in a row, in May 2007 and May 2008, and is the recipient of the AUC Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award for the Academic Year 2001–2002.

Dr. Mifsud graduated in biology from Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest in 2006 and obtained her PhD from the Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna in 2010. Her work with Thomas Jenuwein involved the epigenetic characterisation of a histone methylation deficient mouse model. After her molecular biology training, she started bioinformatics in the laboratory of Professor Nicholas Luscombe at EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Cambridge, and subsequently moved to UCL and the Crick Institute in London. In her postdoctoral work she focussed on developing methods for the analysis of Hi-C type data and finding new biological insights into transcriptional regulation, by applying these methods to Hi-C and capture Hi-C data sets. Dr. Mifsud joined the William Harvey Research Insitute in QMUL as an MRC eMedLab Career Development Fellow and Lecturer in 2015, where she used chromatin interaction data to understand the function of regulatory GWAS mutations. Dr. Mifsud has been an Assistant Professor at HBKU since July 2018.

Khaled Machaca is Professor of Physiology and Biophysics. He has been training and supervision of Hamad Bin Khalifa University graduate students for the past 5 years. Alongside that, he is a professor at Weill Cornell Medicine and serves as the Senior Associate Dean for Research, Innovation and Commercialization for the Qatar campus. In that capacity he oversees the academic, financial, operational and compliance aspects of the research department, which currently encompasses about 200 researchers. Dr Machaca oversaw the establishment of the administrative and regulatory infrastructure, centralized core laboratories, and faculty recruitment. 

The Machaca Lab is interested in intracellular signaling under physiological and pathological conditions with a focus on calcium signaling. Our goal is to better define these signaling pathways at the cellular and molecular levels to identify potential therapeutic targets in various disease states. We are particularly interested in the role of calcium in cancer, cardiovascular and immune disfunction, as well as in oocyte maturation in preparation for fertilization. Work from the Machaca Lab has been published in leading biomedical journals and garnered continuous extramural funding from NIH and the Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF).  Khaled serves of several editorial boards, reviews widely for scientific journals and granting agencies, and has an extensive track record of training students and postdoctoral fellows.

Dr. Bouhali received his PhD in Science from the Universite Libre de Bruxelles in 1999. Since 1994 he has participated in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment program at the Large Hadron Collider Project (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear and Particle Physics (CERN). He was also a member of the fixed target experiment HERMES at the Deutsches Electronen Synchrotron (DESY) and a member of the AMANDA/ICECUBE neutrino telescopes at the South Pole. His field of expertise includes: charged particle detectors, high energy and medical physics and high performance computing. He is Director of Research Computing and Research Associate Professor at Texas A&M University at Qatar.

He is the founder of the TAMU-Q Advanced Scientific Computing (TASC) Center. He is affiliated with the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) in the computational Science and Engineering group. He also chairs the HPC committee at Education City. He has served on many national and international committees, chaired conferences and workshops. In 2015 he received the Faculty Dean’s Distinguished Achievement Award.

Rashad Al-Gaashani obtained his PhD in materials science from UKM, Malaysia, in 2012. He joined QEERI, HBKU, in February 2016 and is currently working as a scientist at the Water Center, serving as the lab focal point for the Water Innovation Lab. He has researched thin-film devices, microwave heaters, and metal oxide nanostructures.

Additionally, Al-Gaashani has extensively researched carbon nanotubes, graphene oxide, activated carbon, biochar, zeolite, and limestone composite materials for wastewater treatment over the past seven years. His research is focused on developing new water filters, particularly high-quality activated carbon from biomass wastes for water treatment. Al-Gaashani has published over 24 peer-reviewed papers, which have been cited by 2703 papers, and has an h-index of 14.

Dr. Monem Beitelmal is a Principal Scientist at the Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute. Dr. Monem previously served as an associate professor of mechanical engineering with the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Santa Clara University (SCU) from January 2009 till December 2013. Before joining SCU, Dr. Beitelmal spent eight years at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto California. As a member of the HP Labs Smart Data Center research team, his research work covered various areas in energy and sustainability from smart thermal control in systems and data centers to district cooling systems. At SCU, Dr. Beitelmal taught several undergraduate and graduate courses such as thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, heat transfer, modern instrumentation, thermal systems design, energy conversion, equilibrium thermodynamics and gas dynamics.

Dr. Abdulazeem holds a PhD and a master's degree in Islamic Financial Law; three BAs in Islamic Law, Arabic Language and English Literature; and two higher studies diplomas in Islamic Law and Human Sciences. He has worked at universities as well as Islamic banks. He is currently a Professor of Islamic Finance at HBKU.