Dr. Saif Al-Kuwari is an associate professor at the College of Science and Engineering and director of the Qatar Center for Quantum Computing (QC2) at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. Dr. Saif Al-Kuwari graduated in computers and networks from the University of Essex and has two PhDs in Cryptography and Computational Forensics from the University of Bath and Royal Holloway, University of London

He is a fellow of IET and BCS and a senior member of IEEE and ACM. His research focuses on quantum cryptography, quantum machine learning, and quantum sensing.

Dr. Mingzhan Xue obtained his Medical degree (Bachelor of Medicine), Master’s degree in Medical Genetics, and PhD in Medicine from the School of Medicine of Xi’an Jiaotong University (known as the Xi’an Medical University before 2000) in China. Between 1984 and 1999, he was appointed Assistant Professor, Lecturer, and Associate Professor in Medical Genetics at Xi’an Medical University, China. He also undertook postdoctoral positions at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, and Newcastle University and Queen Mary University of London in the UK. From 2006 to 2018, he worked as a research fellow at the University of Warwick in the UK.

Dr Ayman Al Haj Zen is an Associate Professor at the College of Health and Life Sciences at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. He obtained his PhD from the University of Paris VII, where he studied the role of small proteoglycans in regulating vascular repair and atherosclerosis. Afterward, he moved to England and worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at various institutions, including the London Research Institute, the University of Bristol, and the University of Oxford. During this time, he focused on studying the role of cell-cell communication signaling in ischemia-induced angiogenesis and vascular regeneration.

In 2013, Dr. Al Haj Zen received an intermediate research fellowship from the British Heart Foundation (Oxford) Centre of Research Excellence allowing him to establish his independent research program in vascular biology and drug discovery at the University of Oxford. His research centered on identifying new therapeutic targets and strategies to modulate angiogenesis and vascular response in diseases such as ischemic vascular disease, atherosclerosis, vascular dementia, and cancer.

His lab develops 3D microfluidics organ-on-chip disease models combined with high throughput quantitative image-based approaches to conduct genetic and drug screens that have applications in understanding underlying disease mechanisms and developing new therapeutics and personalized medicines.

Aisha Al-Qahtani holds a B.S. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Texas A&M University, an M.S. degree in biological and biomedical science and  Ph.D. in biological & biomedical science from (Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU).

Her research focuses on applying electrical engineering in the biomedical field; she was among the team that worked on the biosensor design in smart sensor design at HBKU. She has recently expanded her scope of research to focus more on computational biology in the Center for Artificial Intelligence at Qatar Computing Research Institute.
 

Dr. Samir Belhaouari is an Associate Professor at the College of Science and Engineering at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. He conducts research in various areas, including classification techniques, feature extraction and selection, and data preprocessing. Dr. Belhaouari is developing the multilevel architecture of deep learning (MADL), which optimizes networks at different levels and stages. He has created innovative algorithms for time-frequency decomposition, feature selection, and optimization techniques. Additionally, he explores image and graph representation methods to address complex data challenges and works on compressing deep learning to improve performance while reducing costs and energy consumption.

Additionally, he has developed an enhanced hashing function, drawing inspiration from a mathematical conjecture. His contributions have been recognized through the securing of several national and international research funds, such as HBKU-Thematic and QNRF-NPRP-BSRA. Dr. Belhaouari has served as the principal investigator (PI) and played a significant role in the field of AI. Dr. Belhaouari's work encompasses mathematics, machine learning, data analysis, and classification. His pioneering techniques and algorithms hold great potential for enhancing performance across a wide range of applications.

Dr. Nady El Hajj is an Associate Professor at the College of Health and Life Science at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. He joined Hamad Bin Khalifa University in 2019 as an Assistant Professor. Dr. El Hajj graduated in biology from the American University of Beirut in 2007 and received his PhD from the Institute of Human Genetics at the University of Würzburg in 2011. His dissertation work investigated the epigenetic risks of assisted reproductive technologies and infertility on germ cells and embryos. During his postdoctoral training at the lab of Thomas Haaf, he focused on identifying whether maternal gestational diabetes during pregnancy causes epigenetic alterations in the developing fetus.

In addition, he was involved in studying paternal age effects on germ cells and the offspring of older fathers from an epigenetic perspective. In 2017, he joined Baylor College of Medicine on a fellowship supported by the German research foundation where he performed bioinformatics analysis on whole genome bisulfite sequencing data to understand interindividual DNA methylation variation in humans. His research is published in more than 70 peer-reviewed articles and has been cited more than 3700 times.

Dr. Kabir Hassan Biswas joined the College of Health and Life Sciences at Hamad Bin Khalifa University as an Assistant Professor in 2019 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2025. He earned his Master's and PhD through the prestigious Integrated PhD program at the Indian Institute of Science in 2007 and 2011, respectively. He then conducted postdoctoral research at the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University between 2011 and 2019.

Dr. Biswas’s laboratory takes an interdisciplinary approach, integrating computational methods such as AI/deep learning-based protein design, protein structure-function analysis and drug discovery and experimental techniques such as bioluminescence-based biosensors and biointerfaces with the aim to advance fundamental understanding and developing potential treatment for cancer metastasis, cardiovascular diseases, and infectious diseases. His group is also developing point-of-care tests for health and disease monitoring.

Dr. Biswas has received several competitive research grants, including Academic Research Grant, HBKU Thematic Research Grant, and Industrial Innovation Fund, and has published in high-impact journals such as Science, PNAS, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Nature Communications. He has delivered invited talks at major international conferences and received multiple awards, including the Yamaguchi Medal and the Mrs. C. V. Hanumantha Rao Medal.

Luis R. Saraiva completed his Licenciatura (B.Sc.+M.Sc.) in Biology at the University of Evora, Portugal. He later became a Fellow of the International Graduate School in Genetics and Functional Genomics of the University of Cologne, Germany, where he received his Ph.D. in Genetics. 

After spending a brief period as a visiting scientist at Harvard Medical School (USA), funded by the Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds, he became a post-doctoral scholar at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (USA). In 2013, he was awarded the EBI–Sanger Postdoctoral (ESPOD) Fellowship and continued his postdoctoral training at the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute and the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge (UK). In 2014 he won a Sanger Early Career Innovation Award.

In 2015, he moved to Sidra Medicine (Qatar), where he is a Principal Investigator and leads the Human Disease and Therapeutics Lab at Sidra Medicine (Qatar). He also holds Adjunct Faculty positions at Monell Chemical Senses Center (USA) and Hamad bin Khalifa University (Qatar).

Bernice Lo is an Assistant Professor at the College of Health and Life Sciences at Hamad Bin Khalifa University and an investigator at Sidra Medicine. Her research focuses on understanding the molecular mechanisms of immune regulation and tolerance. Her work includes identifying the genetic basis of disease in patients with immune dysregulation and autoimmunity. The ultimate goal is to elucidate the molecular pathways involved and, therefore, discover new therapeutic targets for disease treatment or novel drugs for immunomodulation.

She has made significant contributions to discovering, understanding, and diagnosing various genetic disorders of immune dysregulation. Dr. Lo’s lab specializes in using cellular and biochemical techniques to uncover the role of newly discovered gene mutations in causing disease and in understanding the function of these genes in immune regulation. She is also interested in developing methods for disease diagnosis or evaluating treatment efficacy by assessing immune biomarkers.

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.