Dr. Majd Hawasly is a scientist at the Arabic Language Technologies group at Qatar Computing Research Institute. He received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2014 in a topic at the intersection of robotics and machine learning. He then joined Five AI, a UK-based autonomous driving startup, where he eventually became a lead research scientist at the applied research team in motion planning and prediction. His research interest lies in developing robust and intelligent AI systems that continually learn and adapt.

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. 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. 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. 

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.

Luigia is an employment lawyer and policy maker with more than 25 years of exponential experience in labor laws, conciliation and adjudication of employment disputes, leadership and organizational behavior, across different countries and legal systems (common and civil law jurisdictions).

She holds a Master Degree in Law, a Post-Degree Master in Human Resources and Communication, a Women in Leadership Executive Program with London Business School and is a qualified conciliator and mediator of labor disputes certified by the International Training Centre of the International Labour Organisation (ITCILO) and trained by Harvard Law School – Program on Negotiation (PON).

She has established the first administrative employment dispute resolution center in the Middle East operating under the ILO guidelines and is also a certified ITCILO Participatory Gender Audit (PGA) Facilitator, specialized in gender and organizational change.

Policy maker and advocate for justice, Luigia has designed innovative legislation and policies with particular focus on gender equality, decent work, harassment and violence in the workplace, justice and partnerships - UN SDGs 5, 8, 16 and 17 and is also a member of the WHO working group of the World of Work Dialogue.

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. Afif Ben Mahmoud is an accomplished geneticist and genome data analyst with extensive expertise in human molecular genetics. He earned an engineering degree in agriculture and animal production, a master's in genetics and biodiversity, and a PhD in molecular and human genetics. With over 12 years of experience in research and academia, Dr. Ben-Mahmoud has dedicated his work to elucidating cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying human genetic diseases, focusing on identifying disease genes and mutations responsible for rare recessive disorders, particularly in Arab populations.

His professional contributions in genetic pathology span from phenotypic and genotypic characterization of patients with monogenic diseases to functional studies aimed at demonstrating the pathogenicity of disease-causing novel genes and gene variations. He has also led numerous projects to decode rare human monogenic diseases, significantly advancing the field. 

Dr. Afif Ben Mahmoud’s notable accomplishments include the first functional analysis of B3GALTL in Tunisian patients with Peters Plus Syndrome, the identification of MAST1 as a novel intellectual disability gene, and confirming the role of B3GALT6 in Al-Gazali Syndrome. Additionally, he has identified 16 autosomal dominant candidate genes in syndromic neurodevelopmental disorders and new candidate loci for intellectual disability and Kallmann syndrome. Dr. Ben-Mahmoud has published 25 high-quality articles in renowned international peer-reviewed journals, with over 500 citations and an h-index of 14.

Dr. Nehad Alajez earned his PhD in tumour immunology from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in USA, and subsequently completed his post-doctoral training at the Princess Margaret Cancer Center (University Health Network), a premier cancer research institute in Canada. His main research interest is to investigate the role of the Polycomb gene family and non-coding microRNAs in driving cancer progression and their potential utilization for targeted therapies. Dr. Alajez is a recipient of several prestigious awards and has published more than 100 articles in top-tier ISI-indexed journals including Blood, Cancer Research, Cell Death and Differentiation, Cell Death and Disease, Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy, Molecular Therapy (family journals), EMBO Molecular Medicine, and in Science Translational Medicine. Dr. Alajez currently has close to 5000 citations and an h-index of 35 and i10-index of 74.

Prior to his current appointment, Dr. Alajez was appointed as the Associate Professor at King Saud University College of Medicine, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Dr. Alajez’s main research interests are focused on ‘translational oncology research’ with main emphasis on novel biomarker discovery and targeted therapeutics for breast cancers. In particular, Dr. Alajez’s team is studying noncoding RNAs (micoRNAs and lncRNAs) as disease and predictive biomarkers for patients’ response to therapy. Dr. Alajez has strong expertise in transcriptome analysis, noncoding RNAs, and biomarker discovery field and is currently ranked among the top 2% most cited scientist globally. He is a recipient of several major grants, including funding from Qatar National Research Fund, in addition to his editorial roles on several journals.