​​​Gouda Chen is from China where he studied computer science at Sun Yat Sen University. Upon graduation, Gouda had a job offer at China Mobile and was set to join the company when he heard about KAUST. When he looked at the KAUST website, he was amazed by the state-of-the-art labs, striking architecture, and supercomputing facilities. Gouda was also excited that famous faculty like mathematician Dr. David Keyes were going to KAUST. Gouda decided to take a chance and applied to KAUST.

He was thrilled to be accepted and was also pleasantly surprised to learn that 50 other students from China were also going to study at KAUST.

Gouda works with Dr. Panos Kalnis on data management and data mining. With the development of the Internet, social networking sites, and research in genetics, data sets are becoming larger and larger. The purpose of data management is to find efficient methods to help people make full use of data, whether in scientific fields or in day-to-day life.

Gouda and three of his classmates were finalists at the ACM SIGMOD programming competition and were invited to present their implementation in the US. He also spent additional time in the US completing an internship at IBM in New York. He enjoyed working with an IBM team to improve the performance of a Message Passing Interface, an application that allows computers to communicate with one another and is used in computer clusters and supercomputers.

He found the research environment at IBM to be similar to the environment at KAUST: very focused and collaborative. Gouda describes his experience, of making friends from all corners of the world and meeting renowned speakers at events like the Winter Enrichment Program, in one word: "Unbelievable!"