Dr. Said Dermime obtained his PhD degree in immunology from Salford University, Manchester, UK in 1992. In 2015, Dr. Said joined NCCCR at HMC, Doha, Qatar as a director of the Translational Cancer Research Facility. Dr. Said Dermime is an adjunct associate professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa. He is also a mentor supervisor of PhD/master’s programs; he supervised 3 PhD and 2 master’s students.

Dr. Said published over 88 peer-reviewed articles in high impact factor journals. He also published several Book Chapters in prestigious publishers and is an editor/reviewer for many prestigious international scientific journals. Dr Said’s most prominent work includes identifying the cause of resistance to the drug retinoic acid in acute leukemia, discovering a novel leukemia vaccine against proteinase-3 as a target antigen and demonstrating that the lymphoma idiotype is a potential cancer vaccine target. He has also demonstrated, for the first time, the expression of the PD-L1 inhibitory molecule in breast cancer patients, showed direct evidence of PD-L1 induction in breast cancer cells and the involvement of both PD-L1 and regulatory T cells in the immune escape of breast cancer.

In addition, he was able to discover an antigen-specific regulatory T cell population in leukemia patients. Recently, he was able to demonstrate that the presence of anti-NY-ESO-1 integrated immunity and a specific cytokines/chemokines profile may potentially identify a response to PD-1 blockade in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) patients. He was also able to show that a patient with metastatic gastric cancer benefiting from combined radio-immunotherapy treatment possesses persistent anti-NY-ESO-1 specific T cells and expresses differential biomarkers. 

Professor Martin Steinhoff is a Professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. He is also the Chairman of the Department of Dermatology and Venereology, Director of the Dermatology Institute, and Director of the Translational Research Institute (TRI) at Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC). He is also a Full Professor at Weill Cornell Medical College New York, USA, Weill-Cornell Medicine-Qatar, and Qatar University. He also holds the position of residency program director for dermatology at HMC.

Professor Steinhoff studied medicine and human biology in Germany, where he received his MD, M.Sc., and PhD from the University of Marburg. After his residency in Dermatology/Venereology, he became an Assistant Professor of Dermatology at the University of Muenster in 2002, promoted from assistant to full professor in 6 years.

He holds board certificates in Dermatology, Venereology, Phlebology and Allergy. His clinical fields of interest are inflammatory skin diseases, translational medicine, and -omics technologies. Prof. Steinhoff is an established physician-scientist with a long-standing basic and clinical research background. His group has discovered several mechanisms that are now the basis for new therapies for skin diseases. He is the author of the most relevant textbooks for Dermatology on Skin Inflammation and Allergy.

For his research, Prof Steinhoff received several prestigious international research awards worldwide. He was a member of the board of directors of the European Society of Dermatology Research (ESDR) and an honorary member of several Societies for Dermatology. According to a publication in 2023, he was considered among the Top 1% of dermatologists worldwide.

Umm-Kulthum is an early career researcher with experience in genomics, metagenomics, biomedical research and metabolomics. She spent most of her life in Qatar where she also graduated with research honours from Carnegie Mellon University located at the prestigious Education City. Her postgraduate experience involved several biomedical research projects including metabolomics of Alzheimer’s disease and liver diseases at Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine in the UK. Her PhD research with Hamad Bin Khalifa University was a combination of clinical and genomics research, looking into the genetics underlying rare growth disorders in paediatric patients recruited from a hospital in Qatar. Currently, Umm-Kulthum is working as a post-doctoral researcher with Professor Omar Albagha where she is involved in numerous Genome-Wide Association Studies projects which utilize the Qatar Genome Programme data to investigate various traits.

Dr. Zubair Shah is an Assistant Professor in the College of Science and Engineering specializing in artificial intelligence and big data analytics with a focus on health informatics. He holds an MS degree in Computer System Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, Italy, and a PhD from the University of New South Wales, Australia. Before joining HBKU, Dr. Shah was a Research Fellow at the Australian Institute of Health Innovation, Macquarie University, from 2017 to 2019.

Dr. Shah's research focuses on applying AI to healthcare, particularly in developing AI-driven applications that enhance disease diagnosis and prediction. He has secured critical funding from HBKU Innovation Center and QNRF to advance these efforts, including work on diabetes management and multimodal AI systems combining electronic health records (EHR), medical imaging, and multi-omics data. His team has developed innovative deep-learning techniques, including methods for identifying IDH mutations from histopathology slides and exploring the use of generative models like GANs and neural diffusion for medical data augmentation.

Dr. Shah has published extensively in leading international journals and conferences, and his research also explores the potential of foundation AI models in healthcare, contributing significantly to advancements in AI-powered medical diagnostics.

Dr. Esmat Zaidan is an Associate Professor at the College of Public Policy at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. She has 22 years of experience in academic institutions and international organizations like the World Bank, the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD), and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). She has spent 13 years in academia, holding senior roles in administration, teaching, and research.

Her experience includes strategic planning, academic accreditation, and ranking, curriculum design and restructuring, the conceptualization of new academic initiatives, scientific research and evaluation, partnerships with stakeholders, as well as team leadership and capacity building. She is a strong advocate for excellence in teaching and research, teamwork and collaborative approaches, and the faculty's role in societal progress. 

Her research primarily focuses on sustainable development policy and planning with an emphasis on sustainable urbanism and the complex interaction between humans and built environments. Her research portfolio extensively covers urban resilience and sustainability policies. 

Dr. Esmat Zaidan’s approach is interdisciplinary, addressing dynamic models of socioeconomic and environmental systems to create simulations and predictive models to enhance understanding and forecasting of the complex interplays between urban and natural environments. This includes the policy pathway for energy-efficient buildings, sustainable, resilient, smart, and people-centric urban areas, as well as impacts of technological change in urban life including smart cities and net-zero carbon communities.

Dr. Abdulkarem Amhamed is a Senior Scientist, CO2 Cluster Program Director, and a Chartered Chemical Engineer by training with 22 years of experience in the oil and gas industry sector including Industry 4.0 and sustainable processes design. Dr. Amhamed earned his PhD and MS degrees in Chemical Engineering from Bradford University, UK, and from University of Salford, UK, respectively. He introduced the Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage (CCUS) research and technology development to QEERI. 

Dr Amhamed has previously held many senior research and management positions, including serving as Strategic Research Project Lead between QP and UOP Honeywell (7.5 Million USD) and Engineering & Projects General Manager-ESSO, Libya. He has a solid experience in CO2 capturing and utilization, LNG, NGL and sour gas purification. His research and industrial experience has attracted more than $10M in external funding. Recently, he obtained the highest grant ($6,4 Million) in HBKU/Qatar Foundation (CO2 Cluster Project). As program director for the grant, he leads more than 29 researchers including PIs, students, and postdoctoral researchers. Dr. Amhamed was an adjunct professor in Benghazi University, where he taught several undergraduate and graduate courses such as chemical reactions, mass transfer, CCUS course, plant process design, and gas sweetening processes.

Dr. Paul Grimshaw is an Associate Professor in Exercise Science at the College of Health and Life Sciences at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. Following a PhD in biomedical engineering in 1987 from the University of Salford, UK, he has lectured in biomechanics, anatomy, and research methods for the past 36 years. He has worked at three Universities in the UK (Brunel, Edinburgh, and Exeter) and two in Australia (School of Health Sciences, University of South Australia and School of Mechanical Engineering, University of Adelaide (UoA)) before joining HBKU in 2021. He has also worked at Halmstad University in Sweden.

His research interests include injury prevention/mechanism of injury and sports performance/technology in golf and athletics; low back pain; gait analysis in children and adults and quantitative assessment of human knee instability. At the University of Adelaide, he was the School's Director of Research (2015), Director of Learning and Teaching (2017), Director of Engagement (2018-2020), and the Program Coordinator for the Bachelor of Engineering (mechanical and sports) 4-year undergraduate professional degree (2009-2018), which was the first of its kind within Australia (established in 2008). To date, he has been involved in the authorship of 141 refereed research articles and has successfully graduated with 15 higher degrees by research students (PhD and MS by research).

Dr. Wisam Kh. Abdul-Jabbar is an Assistant Professor and Assistant Dean of Student Affairs at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. He holds a PhD (funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) from the University of Alberta, where he was awarded The Bacchus Graduate Research Prize for scholarly excellence in international and multicultural education. He was also awarded the University of Alberta President’s Doctoral Prize of Distinction, among other awards such as the JDH McFetridge Graduate Scholarship and the Andrew Stewart Memorial Graduate Prize for outstanding accomplishment and potential in pursuit of new knowledge. He has a master’s degree from the University of Baghdad. He also received a master’s degree from California State University in Humanities. His third master's degree was from Lakehead University in English literature, Canada. Dr. Abdul-Jabbar held a postdoctoral fellowship (also funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) at the University of Calgary. His research considers how intercultural communication resonates with educational practices; it explores the convergences of seemingly differing cultures to infuse intercultural dialogue into educational discourse. Prior to joining Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU), he was a faculty member at Yorkville University and an adjunct professor at the University of Alberta, Canada. He is the author of Negotiating Diasporic Identity in Arab-Canadian Students - Double Consciousness, Belonging, and Radicalization (Palgrave, 2019) and Medieval Muslim Philosophers and Intercultural Communication: Towards a Dialogical Paradigm in Education (Routledge, 2023).

Bakhita Rashid Meqbel is a Research Fellow at the Diabetes Research Center, Qatar Biomedical Research Institute at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. She received her bachelor's degree in biomedical science and masters in master’s in biomedical science with a major in health management from Qatar University. She got her PhD in biological and biomedical sciences from Hamad Bin Khalifa University in 2022.

She has worked as a Senior Lab Technologist for 10 years at Hamad Medical Corporation in the Department of Medicine and Pathology - Microbiology lab. She then pursued PhD degree working in the cancer field. After obtaining her PhD, she joined QBRI as a Senior Research Associate and was later promoted to Research Fellow.

Sultan Barakat is a Professor at the College of Public Policy at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. He is a renowned scholar in the study of war-torn societies and their recovery. He has supervised over 20 PhDs in politics and post-war recovery and graduated a generation of MA peacebuilders and reconstruction specialists. Professor Barakat founded and directed the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies at the Doha Institute from 2016 to 2022 and previously led the post-war reconstruction unit at the University of York from 1993 to 2019.

He has published extensively, with recent books including Russia’s Approach to Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Shelter and Reconstruction after War and Disaster, both released in 2023. With over 30 years of experience, Barakat has worked on conflict management, humanitarian response, and post-conflict recovery, influencing global practices through his publications and advisory roles with organizations like the UN, World Bank, and EU.

He has led evaluations and peace initiatives in various conflict zones, demonstrating his commitment to stability and resilience. His involvement in mediation efforts in Yemen, Syria, and Afghanistan highlights his contributions to peacebuilding. Barakat continues to shape discourse in conflict resolution, earning recognition as a leading authority in the field.