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.
 

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.

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.

Dr. Marwa Qaraqe is an Associate Professor in the College of Science and Engineering at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. She is also the co-founder of the Autism Sensing Center (A-Sense) of the College of Science and Engineering at HBKU. She received her BSc in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University at Qatar with summa cum laude. Dr. Qaraqe earned her MSc and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University in College Station, United States.

Dr. Qaraqe serves as a TPC and reviewer to several prestigious technical journals and conferences, including the IEEE Wireless Communication and Networking Conference (WCNC) and IEEE Wireless Communication Magazine. She is also a member of the IEEE Communication Society (ComSoc) board for the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) Region.

She has received several awards throughout her academic career, including the Best Paper Award in the 2022 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), the Richard E. Wing Award for Excellence in Research, and first place in the Qatar Foundation Annual Research Forum in the Health and Biomedical Sector. She has also been awarded more than 2 million US dollars as lead principal investigator in competitive research grants for her research initiatives.

Dr. Dena Al-Thani is an Associate Professor, Co-Founder of the A-sense Center of Excellence, and Head of the Information and Computing Technology Division at the College of Science and Engineering. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Queen Mary University of London. Her research interests include accessibility, inclusive design, and eHealth.

Dr. Al-Thani actively publishes in top journals and presents at international conferences. Her research on inclusion aims to make a global impact. She is a member of the WHO's technical advisory group on assistive technology and the Arab ICT Accessibility Expert Group, led by Mada.

Dr. Halima Bensmail is a Principal Scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute, a Professor at the College of Science and Engineering at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, and a visiting full Professor at Texas A&M University at Qatar. She received her PhD from Pierre & Marie Currie University in Paris, France, and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington and FHCRC in Seattle, Washington, USA. Halima was an assistant and associate professor at the University of Tennessee and the Virginia Medical School before joining Qatar Foundation. Halima's expertise lies in the frontiers of machine learning, bioinformatics, and computational biology, and she is also a statistician and a biostatistician.

She has published over 140 peer-reviewed papers in high-impact journals such as Nature Communications, Nucleic Acids Research, Genome Research, Briefings in Bioinformatics, Scientific Reports, and Bioinformatics. She has also earned multiple research awards taught courses in Qatar, the US, and France, and mentored many summer interns, and master's and PhD students. Halima has been the principal investigator and co-investigator on various research grants, and she is currently a member of a $2 million newly founded center provided by the USDA grant agency to the obesity center at Texas Tech. Halima has worked as a reviewer for the NIH and NSF, and she is a board member of the Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Technology Foundation in Davos and an AdCom representative of IEEE EMBs in MENA.

Professor Damilola S. Olawuyi, SAN (KC), FCIArb, is a Professor and UNESCO Chairholder on Environmental Law and Sustainable Development at the College of Law. He is also Chancellor’s Fellow and Director of the Institute for Oil, Gas, Energy, Environment and Sustainable Development (OGEES Institute), Afe Babalola University, Nigeria. 

A prolific and highly regarded scholar, Professor Olawuyi has practiced and taught law in Europe, North America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. 

Professor Olawuyi has published close to 100 articles, book chapters, and books on petroleum law, energy, and international environmental law. 

Professor Olawuyi serves on the executive committees and boards of several organizations. He is Vice Chair of the International Law Association; co-chair of the Africa Interest Group of the American Society of International Law (2016-2019); and member of the Academic Advisory Group of the International Bar Association’s Section on Energy, Environment, Natural Resources and Infrastructure Law (SEERIL). He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Sustainable Development Law and Policy.

Professor Olawuyi holds a doctorate (DPhil) in energy and environmental law from the University of Oxford; a master of laws (LLM) from Harvard University; and another LLM from the University of Calgary. He has been admitted as Barrister and Solicitor in Alberta, Canada; Ontario, Canada; and Nigeria.

Professor Olawuyi is a regular media commentator on all aspects of natural resources, energy and environmental law.