
The UK's Astronomer Royal and a Fellow (and Former Master) of Trinity College, Cambridge University







Founder, the Jane Goodall Institute & UN messenger of peace







Affiliate Professor, Department of Pharmaceutics, University of Washington, USA







Professor, American University of Sharjah, UAE







Senior Programme Manager, United Nations ESCWA







Executive Director for Research Enterprise, RSS







Education Advisor, Qatar Foundation







Director, Qatar Genome Project







Professor, Mayo Clinic

Dr. Bydon is a graduate of Dartmouth College and Yale University School of Medicine. He completed his medical residency and a clinical fellowship at Johns Hopkins Hospital. At Mayo Clinic, Dr. Bydon see patients regularly and has received honors for his exceptional delivery of patient care. He also serves as Assistant Dean of Education in the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science and Medical Director of the Mayo Clinic Enterprise Registry, a real-time patient safety and outcome platform that integrates data from Mayo Clinic’s hospitals in the US and internationally. In addition, Dr. Bydon is the Principal Investigator of the Mayo Clinic Neuro-Informatics Laboratory, dedicated to advancing neurologic patient care and safety.
Dr. Bydon is a frequent lecturer and has authored more than 300 peer-reviewed manuscripts in addition to hundreds of book chapters, abstracts and other written publications. He is currently editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Neuroscience and holds reviewer responsibilities for several scientific publications. Dr. Bydon sits on the executive boards of three national neurosurgical societies.





Director of Healthcare Research & Policy, Qatar Foundation-WISH







Associate Professor, Khalifa University







Professor and Associate Dean, HBKU







Associate Professor, HBKU

Dr. Bensmail served as a reviewer for the National Science Foundation and National Institute of Health (USA). She serves as an advisor to the Qatar Anti-Doping Lab and is a member of the HBKU Research committee and a Sidra Internal Grants reviewer member.
Dr. Bensmail is a recipient of the ONRST Fellowship from the Office of Naval Research Science and Technology, Virginia; the International Federation for Classification Society Young Investigator (IFCS) award in Rome and the Qatar Foundation Research Forum recipient award in Computing. Dr. Bensmail won the best contribution in the “Information Complexity (ICOMP) workshop” in Cappadocia in 2015.
Dr. Bensmail received her B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Science in Morocco (1989) and her M.S. (1992) and Ph.D. (1996) from University Paris 6 in France.






Chair of Translational Neuroscience, University of Sheffield







Professor, KAUST

He is one of the Founders of the Program now leading the Communication Theory Lab. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), United States, in 1998.
Professor Alouini current research interests include design and performance analysis of diversity combining techniques, MIMO techniques, multi-hop/cooperative communications systems, optical wireless communication systems, cognitive radio systems, and multi-resolution, hierarchical and adaptive modulation schemes.
Alouini has won several awards in his career: for instance, he recently received the 2019 Technical Achievement Award of the IEEE Communication Society Communication Theory Technical Committee. Prior to this, he was honored in 2017 with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Science and Technology (S&T) Achievement Award in Engineering Science at the First OIC Summit on Science and Technology, Astana, Kazakhstan. He also received the 2016 Recognition Award of the IEEE Communication Society Wireless Technical Committee as well as the 2016 Abdul Hameed Shoman Award for Arab Researchers in Engineering Sciences. Other recognitions include his selection as (i) Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the African Academy of Science (AAS), the European Academy of Science and Arts (EASA), and the Academia Europaea (AE), (ii) IEEE Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Communication Society and IEEE Vehicular Technology Society, (iii) member for several times in the annual Thomson ISI Web of Knowledge list of Highly Cited Researchers as well as the Shanghai Ranking/Elsevier list of Most Cited Researchers and the AMiner 2020 list of the AI 2000 Most Influential Scholars in the area of Internet of Things, and (iv) a co-recipient of best paper awards in twelve IEEE journals/conferences (including Communication Surveys & Tutorials, ICC, GLOBECOM, VTC, PIMRC, ISWCS, and DySPAN).






Founder and CEO, Speetar

Speetar represents a disruptive healthcare model, breaking down economic, social, and geographic barriers that too often limit the options patients have when seeking quality medical care. During the coronavirus pandemic, Speetar’s COVID-19 Platform, a newly developed rapid response solution helped triage patients and mitigate resource limitations in war-torn Libya. Prior to launching Speetar, Mohamed worked at Harvard Medical School’s Center of Engineering in Medicine as a senior researcher where he led the design and development of novel ex-vivo human organ reconditioning systems.
In 2018, Mohamed was named one of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation GoalKeepers, and an Ashoka Visionary in recognition for his efforts leveraging digital technologies to enable healthcare delivery in low resource settings. In 2019 he was awarded the Harvard Medical School Dean’s Community Service Award and most recently was selected as an Aspen Institute Fellow and a Fellow at the MIT Legatum Center of Development and Entrepreneurship.
Mohamed’s passion for improving global healthcare outcomes continues to place him at the intersection of technology, business, and medicine. His work has been featured by Forbes, the BBC, Aljazeera, PRI, PRX, WGBH, and StartupScene MENA among other local and global outlets. Dr. Aburawi holds a Master of Public Administration from Harvard Kennedy School, where he was also a Center for Public Leadership Fellow and Edward S. Mason Fellow. He is currently pursuing an MBA at the MIT Sloan School of Management.






Co-founder & CEO, Zaka







CEO, stallion.ai

In 2013, Obeidat founded Dubai-based National Bullion House and led the development of the first online trading platform for precious metals spot deliverable contracts. As of 2016, he was involved in the investment of over $1 billion in the precious metals markets in the EMEA region.
Prior to this, Obeidat spent over 7 years with major financial brokers and gold trading companies helping them to grow and expand their operations in different jurisdictions in the region.
Obeidat is currently leading, with a group of AI scientists, Stallion.AI, an artificial intelligence solutions company with R&D operations in Ottawa, New York, Limassol, Dubai and recently Riyadh. Stallion AI is on a mission to transform enterprises with advanced AI solutions, products and services across different industries in both public and private sectors. Obeidat is also a managing director at Investifai, a SEC-regulated artificial intelligence-driven investment management, which is on a mission to transform the traditional asset management industry around the world.
Samer has a degree in Applied Sciences, and holds a Master’s degree in Global Management from the Royal Roads University (RRU) in Victoria, BC, Canada, where he conducted an intensive empirical research that focused on managing investment portfolios using deep learning technologies






Full Professor, USTHB

Prof. Guessoum research interests fall within Artificial Intelligence (Automated Reasoning, Natural Language Processing and Machine Translation, Arabic Natural Language Processing). He has published extensively in international journals, conferences, and book collections and has reviewed for a large number of international conferences and journals. He has also been a member/chair of various conference Technical Program Committees and was the General Chairman of the IEEE International Symposium on Programming and Systems (ISPS’2013). He has also worked on various research projects, two European ESPRIT projects while in the UK, and others in Norway, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Algeria.
Prof. Guessoum has a very long experience in teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels (MSc and PhD) and research. He has received various distinctions and awards including scholarships from the Algerian government to pursue Master’s and PhD studies, the College of Arts and Sciences “Distinguished Teacher Award” (University of Sharjah, in May 2007), the “University of Sharjah Distinguished Teacher Award” (Conferred by the Ruler of Sharjah during the university Graduation Ceremony for 2005 to the best university faculty member in terms of teaching), “Certificate of Outstanding Academic Achievement” (the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, after MSc studies), the Bank of Sharjah Award for best graduation project (supervised undergraduate project "A Web-Based Early Warning System for Anti-Microbial Resistance", June 2003), in addition to some best or second best paper awards at international conferences received for papers with (MSc and PhD) students he supervised.
Prof. Guessoum has moreover been in charge of important committees in the various universities he has worked for as well as a member of many others. At USTHB, he was the chair of a university committee who has developed the university 5-year strategic plan in ICT for the period 2015–2019; in the Spring of 2017, he chaired the USTHB committee in charge of Quality Assurance university self-evaluation, required by the Ministry of Higher Education. From 2013 to 2016, he was the Director of the PhD Programme of the Computer Science Department at USTHB, (Algiers, Algeria). He has also chaired or been a member of various committees in charge of education and research matters and a member of the national IT standing committee of the Algerian Ministry of Post and ICT. He is now and then invited as an expert in Quality Assurance in Higher Education for institutional and Computer Science Programme reviews in the Kingdom of Bahrain. Most recently, Ahmed Guessoum has been designated by the National Directorate for Scientific Research and Technological Development (DGRSDT) as the Principal Scientific Coordinator in the organisation of the Workshop on the National Strategic Plan on Artificial Intelligence held in Constantine 1-2/12/2019, the main role being to advise and help in the preparation of the scientific content of the workshop (150 AI experts) that aims at developing an Algerian national strategy in AI. The current effort as a principal scientific coordinator is on finalising the national strategy. Prof. Guessoum has also been selected by the Algerian Ministry of Higher Education and Research to represent Algeria as an Artificial Intelligence Expert at the 17th Meeting of the Arab ministers of Higher Education and Scientific Research, the theme of the meeting being “Artificial Intelligence”, Cairo, 23–25/12/2019.
Prof. Guessoum has also given various general lectures nation-wide in Algeria on topics related to the place of Science in society, scientific research priorities, the brain drain, challenges facing the youth, Artificial Intelligence, the Arabic language in the ICT Era, “Mobile Machine Translation”, etc. He has also been a guest in Algeria on various TV and Radio programmes dealing with some of these topics.






Head, German Jordanian University

Walid graduated from Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST) with a bachelor degree in Biotechnology & Genetic Engineering (accredited by (ASIIN) a German Accreditation Agency for Degree Programs in Engineering, Informatics/Computer Science, the Natural Sciences and Mathematics). Then he earned a Master's degree in Biotechnology from Yarmouk University (YU). He joined the Central Laboratories of the Jordanian Ministry of Health and then the King Hussein Cancer Centre (KHCC) at the Laboratory Medicine Department in Immunogenetics and HLA genotyping laboratories (labs accredited by the College of American Pathologists CAP).
Walid earned his PhD in Pathology from the faculty of Medicine at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia, where he aimed to combine his molecular pathology background with robust biophysical techniques. The Jordanian Accreditation & Quality Assurance Commission for Higher Education Institutions certified Walid to teach Human Physiology for university students. His postgraduate research project focused on the small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) approach to resolve the architecture and conformational changes of an unusual bacterial transcription factor involved in amino acid metabolism in work published in Nucleic Acids Research (NAR), a highly reputed Oxford University Journal that has a 5-year Impact Factor of 10.727.
Besides, Walid and his colleagues at the Jordanian Society of Genetic Engineers (JSGE) have a deep interest in corona-viruses; they have invented a viral RNA extraction kit for SARS-CoV-2 for nasopharyngeal specimens. Walid has had a fellowship in Responsible Conduct of Research from the University of California, San Diego. He is also a member of IEEE.






Postdoctoral Scholar, Genentech

In 2013 Ahmad began his doctoral studies at the Biochemistry department of Stanford University and did his research in the lab of Mark Krasnow. In the first half of his PhD, he molecularly identified the lung alveolar stem cell, the cell of origin for pulmonary fibrosis and lung adenocarcinoma, its supporting niche and the molecular signals emanating from the niche regulating stem cell behavior (Nabhan et al., Science 2018, DOI: 10.1126/science.aam6603). In the second half of his PhD, he worked on the human lung cell atlas (Nabhan and Travaglini et al., Nature, in press) and the mouse aging cell atlas (Tabula Muris Consortium, Nature 2019, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0590-4). These studies provide the molecular foundation for investigating how lung cell identities, functions, and interactions are controlled and maintained and how they go awry during disease.
Today Ahmad is a post-doctoral fellow in the lab of Vishva Dixit at Genentech, after which he intends to return to academia as a professor.






Researcher, University of Oxford

In 2014, Khawaldeh has done an internship at MIT Media Lab (U.S.A.). In early 2015, he started a research internship at the National Magnetic Resonance Research Center of Turkey, he also worked as teaching assistant at Bilkent University (Turkey). Afterward, he started working as a research and teaching assistant between Istanbul Sehir and Bogazici Universities (Turkey). In summer 2016, he started a research internship at MPI for Biological Cybernetics (Germany). In Sep 2016, he started working on a six months research project at the French national center for scientific research. Afterward, he has done a six months research internship at NASA medical Informatics. In summer 2017, he worked as a research assistant at Aalto University (Finland). Starting from January 2018, Khawaldeh joined the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences at University of Oxford (U.K.) and currently he is PhD candidate in clinical neurosciences. Alongside that, Khawaldeh works as technical consultant in medical technologies and artificial intelligence.






Professor, Hashemite University

Awarded the Jordan star of science by His Majesty King Abdullah II, University of Iowa, College of medicine, distinguished alumni Award 2018, Higher Education Reform Expert EU-TEMPUS, Jordan, founder service learning center, Hashemite University, speaker at TEDxDeadsea and TEDxPSUT, World Islamic Economic Forum 2012 and World Science Forum 2015 and 2017.
Developed a community-based model “We love reading” to encourage children to read for pleasure received Synergos Arab world social innovators 2009, Clinton Global Initiative 2010, Library of Congress best practices 2013, World Innovation Summit in Education Award 2014, King Hussein Medal of Honor 2014, Star Award 2015, IDEO.org best refugee education program 2015, UNESCO International Literacy Prize 2017, World Literacy Council Award 2018 and the Jacobs social entrepreneurship award 2018, Science, Technology and Innovation Award UN 2019, Ashoka Fellow 2019
Author of the book: Five scarves, Doing the impossible: If we can reverse cell fate why cant we redefine success, Nova Publisher 2018. Reviewed by Nature







Associate Professor of Pharmaceutics, Ain Shams University, Egypt

Dr. Maha was awarded The African Kwame Nrumah regional award in the field of Life Sciences 2019, the state encouragement prize in the field of advanced technological sciences serving the medical sciences 2017, Obada international prize for distinguished researchers under 40 years 2018, the ACDIMA-Egypt award for the best applied research in 2018, COMSTECH award for the best research paper in biological sciences in 2017, Professor Shawky Alhadad award in the field of cancer tumors 2018, and the Egyptian Excellence medal of the highest class 2020. She is also a peer reviewer in 76 international scientific journals and is an editorial board member in 12 journals, including Nature publishers and Cell Press.
Dr. Maha was granted several awards by diverse funding bodies such as Fondation pour l’Universite’ de Lyon, TWAS/Biovision unit in Bibliotheca Alexandria, FIP foundation for education and research, the National Academy of Sciences, Robert Bosch Stiftung foundation, and the National Institute of health. She is also Africa Science Leadership program ASLP fellow, a TWAS Arab regional office and African academy of Sciences young affiliate, a Next Einstein Forum (NEF) fellow, and an elected member of the Global young academy (GYA), steering committee member of the Arab-German academy of Sciences and Humanities (AGYA), and World Economic Forum expert.






Associate Professor, Qatar University







Associate Professor, Institut Pasteur de Tunis

During the last 13 years, Olfa has been working on the molecular basis of rare DNA-repair diseases. Her research activities paved the way to the set-up of prenatal diagnosis for several life-threatening diseases. Furthermore, she has helped in the introduction of molecular diagnosis for several non-communicable diseases that are quite frequent in Morocco, Egypt, Libya and Algeria.
Since 2014, she has worked on establishing a department dedicated to genetic diagnosis of non-communicable diseases. Olfa is currently conducting her research activities on genetic investigation of rare and ultra-rare genetic disorders predisposing to cancer in the laboratory of "Biomedical Genomics and Oncogenetics" and she is also responsible for the medical genetics core facility in Institut Pasteur de Tunis.
Olfa is being involved as the principal investigator or a partner in many multidisciplinary national and international research projects. She has participated to the organization of several international courses and Scientific & Public events and is continuously coordinating research activities between Tunisian and foreign collaborators.
Olfa Messaoud is an author/ co-author of 40 publications, she is memeber of the editorial board of Frontiers in Genetics journal and is a reviewer for several peer-reviewed journals, she has been awarded the 2nd prize of the 13th edition of the award Sanofi-Aventis for Medical Research.





Senior Data Scientist, Sensyne Health Plc







The Wearables Expert






Coordinator, AGEOS







Executive Director, Legatum Center at MIT

Committed to building sustainable, inclusive, and diverse societies through the application of a more ‘conscious’ form of capitalism, she co-founded Ahead of the Curve (ATC) in 2012 to further that goal - (www.ahead-ofthecurve.com). Dina formerly held the endowed Willard Brown Chair for International Business at the American University in Cairo (AUC), where she also founded the Center for Entrepreneurship, and taught Business Ethics and Social Entrepreneurship. Dina also helped establish the John D. Gerhart Center for Philanthropy and Civic Engagement at AUC in 2006.
Dina is recipient of the Woman Entrepreneur of the Year Award for Egypt by the American Chamber of Commerce in 2016; was recognized by the Embassy of India as a “Woman of Substance” in 2016; was chosen as one of 10 United Nations Global Compact Sustainable Development Goal Pioneers in 2016; and was most recently named as one of the top 50 most influential women by the Amwal Al Ghad Magazine.
Dina is the lead author of From Charity to Social Change: Trends in Arab Philanthropy and key reports including a 7 country study on trends in responsible business practice in the Arab region, and the 2015 UNDP Business Solutions Report.






Professor, University of Jordan

Her research has focused on drug metabolism and pharmacogenetics of the Jordanian population. She was a part of a team that conducted research on genetically isolated populations in Jordan (Chechnians and Circassians), mainly studying diabetes, hypertension and metabolic syndrome and their related genes.
She has published around 37 papers in reputable and prestigious international journals.
She is a member of the International Society of the Study of Xenobiotica (ISSX) since 1997 where she has participated in many of their international meetings. She is also a member of the UK Pharmacogenetics and Stratified Medicine Network (since 2019), EUFEPS (since 2018), The Association of Jordanian Women Academics (since 2016) and the Jordan Pharmaceutical Association (since 1992). In 2011 she was awarded the Daniel Turnberg Traveling Fellowship-Academy of Medical Sciences and was spent at the Institute of Cellular Medicine- Medical School-Newcastle University-UK
She was the founder of the faculty of pharmacy at ZU in 2010 and as part of her duties as the vice president since 2013 she established connections with reputable international universities such as Seprinetiza (Italy), Queens of Belfast (Ireland) and West of England (UK).
Professor Hakooz was a member of The Technical Committee-Medical and Pharmaceutical sector at The Scientific Research Support Fund (2016-2018) and she is a member of the Institutional Review Board (IRB) committee of the International Pharmaceutical research Center (IPRC) since 2006. She also was a member in The Technical Committee for the Registration of Generic Products, Jordanian Food and Drug Administration (JFDA) and the Medical committee in the Circassian Welfare Association.
Over the years, Professor Hakooz, has been an outstanding example as a female researcher, a team-builder, an academic, a mother and true role model.





Director, Womenpreneur Initiative







Researcher, Centre for Smart Modern Construction

Amer also holds a Master of Science degree from the University of the West of England, Bristol (the UK), in Building Information Modelling, Design Construction and Operation, and he was the only one to be awarded a full scholarship (UWE Bristol -Millennium Scholarship) in 2016 to pursue the same. In the UK, Amer has worked with the ‘’Vision Network’’ where he was awarded a grant from the Centre for Digital Built Britain based in the University of Cambridge to enable delivery and management of Digital Built Britain through asset, infrastructure, and service lifecycles. Amer was nominated by Transport for London to help them in Building Information Modelling implementation and he proposed a pathway focusing on current positioning and challenges for the future of London as a smart city. He was also nominated by the Digital Construction England Community to participate as speaker in the Peer to Peer BIM network where he talked about the integration of BIM and IoT to enable smart cities and enhance the level of digitalisation in the UK construction industry and also as a speaker for the UWE Bristol Conference in both 2017 and 2018.
Amer is also an entrepreneur as he has officially registered his company (A&H Group Ltd) with the UK Companies House (Company No.11182370) and worked as a BIM and Innovation consultant to several companies in England and the MENA region. In fact, Amer has worked in the AEC industry since 2009 in the UK and MENA region as a BIM consultant / Civil Engineer for making the BIM business case and establishing the BIM road map and planning BIM implementation. With more than a decade in the industry, he is a geek, he is energetic, positive and smart – and he is still only 32 years old.






CEO & Co-Founder, Eventtus







Lecturer and Researcher, University of North Texas

Dr. Qandil’s research focuses on solar energy harvesting, with the use of algorithmically-optimized designs of Fresnel lenses. His work is committed to commercialize the use of Fresnel-lens concentrators and its applications, while simplifying the process from design to implementation. Ongoing projects include; high-temperature solar fabrication, solar water desalination and fresnel-based concentrated photovoltaics.






Executive Director, Jane Goodall Institute

Roots & Shoots is dedicated towards inspiring the next generation to become responsible global citizens by taking mindful action in protecting our planet.
A Business (Hons) graduate with a Masters in Marketing, she is a judge for the Observer Ethical Awards and the Women’s Innovation Awards; a fellow of St George’s House, Windsor Castle, a member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and the Institute of Directors.






Vice-President of the University of Carthage, University of Carthage

He received the engineer degree from the Telecommunication Engineering School of Tunis, Tunisia in 1995, the Master Degree (DEA) and the the Ph.D degree in Electrical Engineering from the ” Ecole Nationale Ingénieurs de Tunis”, in 1995 and 2000 respectively, and ”le Diplôme de l’Habilitation Universitaire” from SUP’COM at the University of Carthage in Tunisia in 2008.
He is a founding member of the Research Unit in Satellite Imagery and its Applications (URISA) in January 2004 (2004-2011), and a founding member of the Communication, Signal and Image Laboratory (COSIM-Lab) in November 2011 at SUP’COM. Between 2000 and 2002 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the ” Ecole Nationale des Télécommunications”, Paris, France consecutively at the department TSI and then at the department COMELEC.
He is a senior member of the IEEE and he served as a member of the Executive Committee of the IEEE Tunisia Section (2013-2015). He has authored and co-authored more than 70 journal papers, conference papers and book chapters. His main research interests include interferometric radar imagining, multiemporal and multiscale image analysis, desertification, flooding and soil salinity mapping from remote sensed data, and SAR-nanosatellite development.





Regional Coordinator for Africa, Space Generation Advoisory Council

She has a Certificate on Cryptography, And on Space Policy.
She worked on Jupiter Icy Moons Satellite, Biomass Satellite, Kompsat 7 satellite, QB50 Constellation, Plato Telescope, and has also Participated on the launch and assistance of african mini satellites.
Now she is a Regional Coordinator for Africain Space Generation Advisory Council In Support of the United Nations Programme on Space Applications, UNOOSA Delegate, Space Strategy of the African Region researcher" with several publications on the topic.




