Dr. Manal Alsalama is a Research Associate at the Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute (QEERI). Manal holds a Bachelor’s degree in Physics from King Saud University in Saudi Arabia and a Master’s degree in materials science and technology from Qatar University. She obtained her Ph.D. in sustainable energy from Hamad Bin Khalifa University. Her research focuses on the development of nano-bulk and nanocomposites thermoelectric materials for energy conversion applications. She has experience in nanomaterial synthesis and characterization.
 

Dr. Usaama al-Azami is an Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at the College of Islamic Studies. He earned his BA in Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Oxford, his ʿālimiyya at the Al-Salam Institute, and his MA and PhD in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University.

His interests lie in Islamic intellectual history, with a particular focus on diachronic transformations in Islamic political thought. His first book, Islam and the Arab Revolutions (Oxford University Press, 2022), examines the way in which influential Islamic scholars responded to the Arab uprisings of 2011 through 2013. He is currently working on a monograph project that explores the question of takfir or excommunication and its diachronic developments from early Islam to modernity.

Dr. Al-Azami's PhD thesis, the chapters of which he is preparing for publication, is entitled "Modern Islamic Political Thought: Islamism in the Arab World from the Late Twentieth to the Early Twenty-first Centuries." In it, he explores how Arab ulama of a mainstream "Islamist" orientation have engaged Western political concepts such as democracy, secularism, and the nation-state, selectively adapting and assimilating aspects of these ideas into their understandings of Islam. Dr. Al-Azami's broader interests extend to a range of disciplines from the Islamic scholarly tradition from the earliest period of Islam up to the present.

George Mikros before assuming his Professor position at the MA Program of Digital Humanities at HBKU, he was Professor of Computational and Quantitative Linguistics at the University of Athens Greece. He is the director of the Computational Stylistics lab. He is also Adj. Professor at the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, USA. He had the position of Research Associate at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing and he was part of research groups that have developed significant language resources and NLP tools for Modern Greek. Since 1999 holds the position of Teaching Associate at the Hellenic Open University and since 2016 he is the Director of the Undergraduate Program “Spanish Language and Culture”. Prof. Mikros has authored 5 monographs and more than 80 papers published in peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings, and edited volumes. Since 2007 he has been elected as Member of the Council of the International Association of Quantitative Linguistics (IQLA). In 2018 he was elected its President. He is a keynote speaker and invited speaker in many international conferences, workshops and summer schools related to Digital Humanities and Quantitative Linguistics. His main research interests are computational stylistics, quantitative linguistics, computational linguistics, and forensic linguistics.

Dr. Azhar Siddique has more than 20  years’  experience in the field of evaluation of environmental stressors affecting receptor ecology through contaminant exposure in urban areas of developing countries. Additionally, he has comprehensive experience in supervising and conducting ambient air quality monitoring, managing projects, setting goals, and interpreting  data for regulation/abetment purposes. 

In the early stages of his career, he  dealt mostly with biophysical interactions in aquatic systems. Later, his work shifted towards the current air quality studies of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and associated health risks in urban areas of the Middle East region. His work has been associated with similar studies in Pakistan and the USA, partners with the US National Academy of Sciences. 

Additionally, he had conducted studies on non-methane hydrocarbons (VOCs) profiling during the holy pilgrimage in western Saudi Arabia with the University of California, Irvine.

Over the years, his training as a laboratory-based chemistry graduate shifted more towards field-based environmental studies involving an interdisciplinary perspective of health and well-being. This was drawn from a variety of academic areas, including epidemiology, hazard identification, risk assessment, management and communication, which are critical subfields of public health.

Dr. Akel Ismail Kahera is a professor and the director of the Graduate Program in Islamic Architecture and Sustainable Urbanism at the College of Islamic Studies, Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha, Qatar. Raised in Brooklyn, New York, he earned his Bachelor of Architecture from the Pratt Institute, followed by a Master of Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. from Princeton University.

With over thirty years of international experience as an architect, urban planner, and critic, he has also held a range of academic and administrative roles, including professor and dean at Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of the Arts in Qatar; professor and senior associate dean for research and graduate studies at Clemson University in South Carolina; and professor and director at Prairie View A&M University. 

Dr. Kahera’s research, supported by grants from the Qatar Foundation and the Brown Foundation of Houston, Texas, explores the cultural, typological, and sustainable dimensions of architecture and urbanism across the MENA region, the Americas, and the Global South. Dr. Kahera is a trustee of the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture, and Urbanism (INTBAU) and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of New Design Ideas, among other affiliations.

Dr. Ahmet Faruk Aysan is a Professor and Associate Dean for Research at Hamad Bin Khalifa University and a full member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences (TÜBA). He previously served as a Board Member and Monetary Policy Committee Member at the Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye. He has also consulted for prominent institutions, including the World Bank, Oxford Analytica, and the Central Bank of Türkiye. His research contributions have earned him multiple awards, including the Islamic Economics Research Award from IKAM, the Arab Fintech Forum’s Fintech Researcher of the Year Award (2023), and HBKU’s Research Excellence Award (2024). He is also a recipient of the Boğaziçi University Foundation’s Publication and Academic Promotion Awards, as well as the prestigious Ibn Khaldun Prize. Dr. Aysan is a Research Associate at University College London’s Centre for Blockchain Technologies (UCL CBT), a Research Fellow at the Economic Research Forum, and a Non-resident Fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs. He also chairs the MENA Chapter Academy of Sustainable Finance, Accounting, Accountability & Governance (ASFAAG). In 2020, Dr. Aysan was listed among the top influencers in Islamic banking and finance by an academic article published in the Pacific-Basin Finance Journal.

Dr. Mehdi Riazi obtained his PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Toronto. He has supervised 50 master’s and 22 doctoral theses to completion. He has been the chief investigator for three research projects on test validation funded by IELTS, Pearson, and Educational Testing Service (the writing section of the TOEFL-iBT). 

He is the author of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Research Methods (Routledge, 2016) and Mixed Methods Research (Equinox, 2017), and more. His academic works have been cited 4,397 times by other researchers. He has an h-index of 33 and an ih-index of 63 according to Google Scholar.

Kamilla Swart-Arries is an Associate Professor and Director of the Masters in Sport and Entertainment Management program, a joint degree with the University of South Carolina. She has 30 years of experience in sport, tourism, and event management that spans academia and the private sector and has consulted broadly in both public and private sectors.

Swart-Arries has worked in industry as a Sport and Facilities Manager at the Cape Town 2004 Olympic bid and as a Sponsorship Consultant for Octagon SA delivering strategic sponsorship services to major corporates in South Africa. She also headed the Durban Events Corporation – a public-private sector partnership with the City of Durban to use events to attract tourism where she was instrumental in driving the 2010 FIFA World Cup research agenda. Kamilla has headed major research projects managing field research at the 2008, 2012, and 2016 Olympic Games, and the 2010 and 2014 FIFA World Cups.

She worked closely with Qatar Foundation's 2022 FIFA World Cup master program and the supreme committee for delivery and legacy in driving the research agenda. Kamilla served as Co-Chair of the World Association of Sport Management Conference Qatar 2023. She has been appointed to the Scientific Committee (research pillar) of the UNESCO Chair on Governance & Social Responsibility in Sports.

Yehia Manawi is a scientist at Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute’s (QEERI’s) Water Center and Natural and Environmental Hazards Observatory (NEHO). He works on pressure-driven membrane processes at the Water Center and on monitoring naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORMs) in Qatar’s groundwater and seawater at NEHO.

Dr. Zhaoyang Liu is a Senior Scientist at Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute's (QEERI) Water Center. He specializes in advancing water treatment technologies, with a number of his research outcomes published in top journals like Energy & Environmental Science, and Advanced Materials, and featured in Nature. Dr. Liu has an h-index of 45 on Google Scholar (Jan. 2023). Leading projects at QEERI, he focuses on addressing local challenges from the perspective of the Water-Energy-Food nexus. His team has developed pilot-scale water treatment prototypes. He is the holder of multiple patents (PCT, US, EU), one of which has been licensed to a commercial company in Singapore. He serves on the editorial boards for the journals of Desalination and Scientific Reports. Dr. Liu's experience extends to mentoring PhD candidates at HBKU.