Professor Iman Roqan is a founding faculty member of KAUST, joining the university in 2008 as the first Saudi female faculty member. She went on to establish Saudi Arabia’s first spectroscopy lab for semiconductor research, seeking to improve optoelectronic and photonic devices e.g. emitting devices, lasers and optical sensors. Her research focus is wide bandgap semiconductor-based devices for novel deep UV-visible optoelectronic devices, including optical sensors and high efficiency emitting devices; she developed a technology that enables several optoelectronic devices to be combined into a single chip with solar cell, transistor, photodetector and light-emitting diode capabilities. She is an inventor of multiple patents related to semiconductor technologies, and has received several international awards recognizing her unique contributions. Outside the lab, Professor Roqan teaches courses on optoelectronic devices and semiconductors at KAUST, and served as visiting faculty at the Imperial College London, UK (2009-2014).​

Professor Roqan's research centers on advancing technology on ultrafast spectroscopy as well as nanostructure semiconductor-based device fabrication (e.g. quantum dots, nanotubes and nanowires, etc.), with aims to develop large-scale optoelectronic applications, mainly nitrides, oxide and perovskite semiconductors. Potential applications for optical spectroscopy include: carrier dynamics and studying the effect of defect bands to identify their source such as time-resolved spectroscopy (TRS), and advanced photoluminescence measurements aiming to develop novel smart light emitting and photodetector devices. Roqan develops different techniques for cost-effective, high-performance device fabrications.​