Born and raised in Argentina, Dr. Juan Manuel Murias completed his undergraduate degree in Physical Education and an MSc in Exercise Physiology in his hometown. After moving to Montreal, Canada in 2003, Juan Manuel completed a second MSc at McGill University, followed by a PhD in Integrative Physiology of Exercise (Western University, London, Canada) and Postdoctoral training focusing on vascular control at the same institution.

Following a 10-year appointment at the University of Calgary (Canada), in May 2023 Juan Manuel joined the College of Health and Life Sciences at Hamad Bin Khalifa University as an Associate Professor. Juan Manuel’s research examines how adequate manipulation of the metabolic stress (i.e., intensity) of endurance exercise contributes to maximizing central (e.g., cardiac output, blood volume, conduit arteries) and peripheral (e.g., microcirculation, muscle metabolism) responses that affect cardiovascular components responsible for oxygen transport and distribution at rest and during exercise. Recent work also incorporates the evaluation of central and peripheral measures of neuromuscular fatigue. Although Juan Manuel’s work is applied to different groups ranging from clinical populations to trained individuals, his research has a special focus on how sex and age contribute to the characteristics of adaptations within the cardiovascular and neuromuscular systems.

Dr. Arafat earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Maryland in the United States. He subsequently worked there before joining the Faculty of Economics and Political Sciences at Cairo University in Egypt. Additionally, he gained experience by working at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in South Korea, and both Qatar University and Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar.

Dr. Arafat's research encompasses various topics within comparative politics and international relations, including multiculturalism, state fragility, personality cult, political reform in monocratic regimes, peacebuilding in protracted social conflicts, and decentralized conflicts.

Dr. Eltabakh is a Principal Scientist at Qatar Computer Research Institute (QCRI). He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Purdue University in 2010. He was a faculty member in the Computer Science Department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), MA, USA, between 2011 and 2022. He has extensive industry-related experience working at Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Teradata (in the USA) for more than 8 years combined.   Dr. Mohamed Eltabakh’s research expertise spans the broad areas of big data management, scalable data analytics, AI and large language models, and distributed systems. Dr. Eltabakh is leading the Fanar project, an Arabic-centric GenAI platform developed in Qatar. Dr. Eltabakh’s research is funded by several entities, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), USA, the Ministry of Transportation (MoT), Qatar, and the Ministry of Interior (MoI), Qatar. 

Deborah Giustini holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Manchester. Before joining HBKU, she was a lecturer and postdoctoral fellow at KU Leuven (where she remains a research fellow in Interpreting Studies), lecturer and teaching assistant at the School of Social Sciences and the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute of the University of Manchester, and a research fellow in Sociology at Higher School of Economics. She has held research visiting positions at the Warwick Business School, at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and Sophia University (Japan).

Her research takes a sociologically-informed perspective on labour processes and digitalization in knowledge-intensive sectors, such as the language industry, and practices of intercultural communication in organizations. Deborah has recognized international expertise in practice theory, and is a member of the Practice Theory Consortium at Lancaster University.

Deborah’s expertise is also built on her experience as a language specialist accredited to the Chartered Institute of Linguists, and with international think tanks including the WBG’s Macroeconomic Policy Working Group and the Economic Change Unit. She is an active member of the European Sociological Association, the British Sociological Association, the British Universities Industrial Relations Association, and the European Group for Organizational Studies.

Dr. Annalisa Terranegra obtained her MSc in biological sciences at the University of Siena, PhD in molecular medicine, and postgraduate diploma in nutritional sciences at the University of Milan, Italy.

Dr. Terranegra currently holds the position of joint assistant professor in the College of Health and Life Sciences at Hamad bin Khalifa University, Qatar, and in the College of Health Sciences at Qatar University, Qatar.

From 2001 to 2014, she gained extensive experience in clinical nutrition, molecular biology, and genetics during her career at the University of Milan, San Raffaele Hospital, and San Paolo Hospital in Milan, Italy. From 2003 to 2014, she worked as an assistant professor at the University of Milan, Italy.

Dr. Terranegra joined Sidra Medicine in 2014. At Sidra Medicine, she leads the laboratory of precision nutrition (PreNutri Lab) which focuses on characterizing the mechanisms underlying the role of food and nutrients in the development and management of pregnancy complications, infertility, and pediatric non-communicable diseases. The PreNutri lab research projects focus on understanding the effect of diet on gut microbiota, metabolomics, and epigenetic mechanisms, as well as diet interaction with the genomic background, using the most advanced technologies, such as bacterial 16S rRNA sequencing, NGS, DNA-methylation arrays, HPLC-MS, GC-MS, and nutritional assessment.

Dr. Maria Jimenez-Andres has extensive teaching experience in the fields of translation, interpreting and languages in the UK, Spain and the UAE. As a translator and interpreter, Dr. Maria has engaged in various roles at institutions such as the Bolivarian Embassy of Venezuela and Ipsos Mori in the United Kingdom.

Dr. Maria has a degree in Translation and Interpreting, an MA in Higher Education, and a PhD in Translation and Intercultural Studies. Her dissertation was on communication and language management in organizations supporting refugees. Her commitment to this work goes beyond academia. She is active in outreach and has carried out a number of research and non-research projects with NGOs working with refugee and migrant communities in Europe and the Middle East. More recently, she has produced a documentary, Tempo, on the lives of refugee musicians.

Dr. Julia Reichelt qualified as a Molecular Biologist at Marburg University, Germany. She studied the biology of skin keratins at the Universities of Bonn and Cologne, Germany. At Newcastle University, UK, she started using genome editing technologies to develop gene therapies for keratinopathies including epidermolytic ichthyosis and epidermolysis bullosa. At EB House Austria, Salzburg, she was involved in the life-saving gene therapy in a boy with junctional epidermolysis bullosa who had 80% of his skin replaced with his own gene corrected keratinocytes. She continued to work on CRISPR-mediated gene therapy development in Innsbruck, Austria, before recently moving to Qatar to join Hamad Medical Corporation where her research is focused on translation of personalized gene therapy approaches into the clinic. Since 2022, she is affiliated with HBKU serving as Adjunct Associate Professor at the CHLS.

Dr. Julia supervised and mentored >50 students in her laboratory, published ˃ 55 peer reviewed articles, and has served as peer reviewer for several scientific journals and funding bodies.

Dr. Saleh obtained her bachelor’s degree in Biological Sciences from Qatar University in 2014. She later joined the Ardehali Laboratory as a visiting scientist at David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA). She participated in the characterization of cardiovascular progenitor cells derived from human pluripotent stem cells. Dr. Saleh then joined Dr. Apil Pyle Laboratory as a Graduate Student Researcher; she investigated how Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy disease severity, in mouse models, impacts the systemic delivery of human skeletal muscle progenitor cells. She obtained her PhD in Molecular, Cellular and Integrative Physiology from UCLA in 2022. 

Dr. Nayef A. Mazloum is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. He graduated from the American University of Beirut in 1994 and completed his PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology at New York Medical College in Valhalla in 2003.

Dr. Nayef A. Mazloum worked as an instructor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. He did his postdoctoral training at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and worked at Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar (WCM-Q).

Dr. Mazloum’s research focuses on the molecular aspects of DNA repair mechanisms, the stability of the genome, and how the dysfunction of these regulatory pathways could lead to cancer, age-related or metabolic diseases.

His lab employs cellular, molecular, and genetic tools to investigate altered molecular pathways in metabolic disorders and cancer. Dr. Mazloum actively collaborates with local stakeholders in Qatar, including Hamad Medical Corporation, Qatar University, Texas A&M University, Qatar Biomedical Research Institute, and Hamad Bin Khalifa University. He also collaborates with global investigators at Harvard Medical School, Mayo Clinic, Brown University, and the University of East Anglia.