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. 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.

Jasir Jawad is a Research Engineer at Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute (QEERI) at Haman Bin Khalifa University, Qatar. His research at QEERI is focused on the operation and supporting maintenance at the advanced MED pilot plant. He is also involved in the operation, maintenance, mathematical modeling and analysis of the Linear Fresnel Collector and Organic Rankine Cycle (LFC-ORC) pilot power plant at the QEERI outside testing facility. Moreover, he is studying advanced water vapor compression using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tools.
 
He received his MS degree in Chemical Engineering from Texas A&M University at Qatar. He earned his bachelor's in Chemical Engineering from NED University of Engineering and Technology, Pakistan. 

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).

Dr. Atef Zekri graduated with a PhD in Physics in 2017 from the University of Oldenburg (Germany). Before joining QEERI as a Post-Doc in April 2018 and then as a Scientist in July 2019, he worked as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Energy and Semiconductor research group within the Institute of Physics in the University of Oldenburg (Germany). Atef obtained his Master of Science in Materials Science from Saarland University (Germany) and his Bachelor of Science from Saarland University (Germany) as well as a Bachelor of Engineering from EEIGM (École Européenne D'ingénieurs en Génie des Matériaux, France). His current research interests focus on state-of-the-art electron microscopy across a wide range of materials such as the Scanning and Transmission Electron Microscopy (SEM/TEM), Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM), Energy-Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy (EDS), and Focused Ion Beam (FIB).