ABOUT
Join us for a high-impact virtual workshop designed to empower academics, researchers, and students with insights from world-class scholars on publishing influential research, advancing academic careers, and making a lasting impact.
This one-day event will explore the habits, strategies, and ethical standards that define top-tier researchers. Whether you're looking to elevate your research, publish more effectively, or chart a strong academic path, this workshop delivers practical, proven advice directly from those who’ve done it.
AGENDA
09:00 – 09:10
09:10 - 09:20
09:20 – 09:30
09:30 – 10:00
10:00 – 10:30
10:30 – 11:00
11:00 – 11:15
11:15 – 11:45
11:45 – 12:15
12:15 – 12:45
12:45 – 13:05
13:05 – 13:35
13:35 – 14:05
14:05 – 14:15
*10 minutes of Q&A at the end of each session
SPEAKERS
Omar Knio received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering in 1990 from MIT. He held a postdoctoral associate position at MIT, before joining the Mechanical Engineering Faculty at Johns Hopkins University in 1991.
In 2011, he joined the Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science Department at Duke University, where he also served as Associate Director of the Center for Material Genomics. In 2012, he was named the Edmund T. Pratt, Jr., Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Duke.
In 2013, he joined AMCS Program at KAUST, where he also served as Deputy Director of the SRI Center for Uncertainty Quantification in Computational Science and Engineering, as Interim Dean of the Division of Computer, Electrical, and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering, and as Associate Vice President, National Partnerships, Engagement and Academic Liaison, of the KAUST National Transformation Institute.
In October 2024, he was appointed as Interim Vice President, Education and Academic Affairs.
He is a founding Associate Editor of SIAM/ASA Journal on Uncertainty Quantification, and currently serves on the Editorial Board of International Journal for Uncertainty Quantification.
He is the recipient of an Associated Western Universities Faculty Fellowship Award in 1996, a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Award in 2003, an R&D100 Award in 2005, and a Distinguished Alumnus Award from the American University of Beirut in 2005, and of an Abdul-Hameed Shoman Award for Arab Researchers in 2019.
Deputy Minister for International Cooperation, Ministry of Education
Owner of the University Excellence Initiative
Professor Nasser holds a Ph.D. from McGill University in Canada. He is also a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Research Associate at Harvard University.
Professor Nasser has been formally Deputy Minister for Research and Innovation and Vice President of King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals for Studies and Research. He has more than 120 scientific publications and 25 patents registered in the US Patent Office (USPTO) and 3 patents in the Gulf Patent Office.
Education
D.Sc. and M.S., Computer Science, George Washington University
B.S., Computer Science, King Abdulaziz University
Dr. Al-Aama is a trailblazing Saudi expert in digital transformation and the first Saudi female professor in Computer Science. She is the recipient of multiple prestigious national and international awards, including the MCIT Saudi National Achievement Award and the Arab Informatics Expert Award.
With a distinguished career spanning government, academia, and industry, she led Jeddah’s digital transformation as Vice Mayor for IT, earning over 20 major awards. She has also served as an advisor to key government ministries such as the Ministry of Economy and Planning (MEP), the Ministry of Municipalities and Housing (MOMAH), and the Ministry of Hajj and Umrah (MHU), as well as prominent organizations like KPMG and the Digital Economy Center.
In academia, she played a foundational role in establishing and leading the College of Computing & Information Technology at King Abdulaziz University.
She is currently the Vice President of Institutional Advancement at KAUST, where she leads national and international educational partnerships, student recruitment, new program development, alumni engagement, and accreditation efforts. In this role, she plays a vital part in advancing KAUST’s strategic educational priorities and global collaborations
Executive Director, Global Coral Reef R&D Accelerator Platform Ibn Sina Distinguished Professor and Tarek Ahmed Juffali Research Chair in Red Sea Ecology Academic, Royal Academy of Science of Spain Red Sea Research Center (RSRC) Computational Biosciences Research Center (CBRC)
Marc G. Genton is the Al-Khawarizmi Distinguished Professor of Statistics at KAUST. He received the Ph.D. degree in Statistics (1996) from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2010, he received the El-Shaarawi award for excellence from the International Environmetrics Society and the Distinguished Achievement award from the Section on Statistics and the Environment. He received the Georges Matheron Lectureship award in 2020 from the International Association for Mathematical Geosciences, the Royal Statistical Society 2023 Barnett Award for his outstanding research in environmental statistics and the prestigious 2024 Don Owen Award. He led a team who was awarded the 2024 ACM Gordon Bell Climate Modelling prize for exascale climate emulators. His research interests include spatio-temporal data, with applications in environmental and climate science, and renewable energies.
Niveen M. Khashab earned her PhD in organic chemistry with a medicinal chemistry minor form the University of Florida (UF), under the guidance of Prof. Alan R. Katritzky in 2007. She then joined sirFraser Stoddart’s Lab, 2016 Nobel prize winner, at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA),and then at Northwestern University, Chicago (NU) specializing in nanoscience and supramolecular chemistry.
She joined the Chemistry program at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) as a founding assistant professor in late 2009. She is currently a full professor and the Associate Dean of the Physical Science and Engineering Division.
She focuses on smart systems that specifically can be employed in the Health and Wellness research thrust as well as Energy and Sustainable Economies. Recently, her major research emphasis has been directed towards Crude to Chemicals and Uranium Extraction from mining water.
She is the recipient of the Crow Award in Organic Chemistry in 2004, AlMaraai Award for Nanotechnology in 2013 and the L’Oréal-Unesco Women in Science International Award in 2017. In 2021, she was named a fellow of the Royal Chemical Society. She also won the prestigious Cram Lehn Pederson award in 2023 and was the inaugural winner of the prestigious Great Arab Minds in Natural Science in 2024.
She is on the editorial board of 10 scientific journals (ACS, RSC, Wiley) and currently serves as an associate editor at Chemistry of Materials (ACS). She has published over 150 papers as a corresponding author and authored translational patents on biologics encapsulation and delivery as well as smart bio-materials based on Red Sea Algae.
Tareq Al-Naffouri is Professor of Electrical Engineering at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. He obtained his BS and MS from KFUPM and his PhD from Stanford University in 2004, all in Electrical Engineering. He subsequently joined the Electrical Engineering Department at CalTech as a post-doc. He was an assistant/associate professor at KFUPM 2005-2012 and a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Southern California (USC) Feb-Sep 2008. His research interests are in signal processing, inference, and learning and their applications to wireless communications, smart cities, and smart health. In addition to Stanford and CalTech, he has/had collaborations with researchers at UCLA, the University of Texas at Dallas, Texas A&M, Boston University, ETH and various other universities in Europe and the Middle East. In 2023, he won the Shoman Prize for Arab Researchers for his research contributions to the internet of things. He is an IEEE Fellow.
Professor Al-Babili is a distinguished researcher in the field of plant science and a Full Professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). He earned his Ph.D. in Cell Biology (in 1996) from the University of Freiburg, Germany, where he also completed his Habilitation in 2007. His research focuses on improving the agricultural performance and nutritional value of crops through advanced metabolic engineering. He is internationally recognized for his pioneering work on carotenoid biosynthesis, provitamin A biofortification, and the discovery and functional analysis of novel plant signaling molecules. His recent work delves into the metabolism of key plant hormones, including abscisic acid and strigolactones—critical regulators of plant development and stress responses, as well as mediators of plant interactions with symbiotic and parasitic organisms. Professor Al-Babili’s contributions are not only advancing fundamental plant biology but are also addressing global challenges such as food security and sustainable agriculture.
Osman M. Bakr is Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and Vice Provost at KAUST; and Executive Editor at ACS Materials Letters (American Chemical Society). He earned his B.Sc. in Materials Science and Engineering from MIT and Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Harvard. His research group works on the design and synthesis of hybrid and inorganic materials to generate breakthrough applications in solar energy harvesting, photonics, and optoelectronic devices. His group has been at the forefront of the synthesis, property elucidation, and applications of two major classes of hybrid materials: metal halide perovskites and atomically precise metal nanoclusters. Bakr published over 377 articles in international peer-reviewed journals (including 67 Clarivate Highly Cited Papers); and 16 patents and invention disclosures (5 of which are commercially licensed). His group’s research appeared in leading interdisciplinary publications such as Science, Nature Energy, Nature Photonics, Journal of the American Chemical Society, and others.
Bakr is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and a Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining. He was selected as a Young Scientist by the World Economic Forum (2016); and as a member of the Editorial Advisory Boards of ACS Energy Letters (2016) and Chemistry of Materials (2017). He was awarded the Innovator Under 35 Award in the Arab World by the MIT Technology Review- Arab Edition (2016); The King’s Award for Inventors and the Gifted (2018); the Asian Rising Stars Lectureship (2019); the Abdul Hameed Shoman Arab Researchers Award in Basic Sciences and the Almarai Distinguished Scientist Prize (2020); the Kroll Medal & Prize by the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (2021); the Kuwait Prize (2022); the Research Excellence Award by the Research Development and Innovation Authority, RDIA, KSA (2025). The Times Higher Education named Bakr one of the ten leading university researchers world-wide in the field of perovskite solar cells (2018) and Clarivate designated Bakr as a Highly Cited Researcher in both Materials Science and Chemistry.
Bakr founded Quantum Solutions, a market leader in wide range imaging systems and cameras based on solution-processed hybrid materials.
Harry is Editorial Development Manager at Nature Portfolio and is an expert trainer for Nature Masterclasses. With strong scientific qualifications, he has almost a decade of academic research experience and multiple publications in chemistry. After receiving his doctorate, he worked in world leading research groups in Auckland, New Zealand and Oxford, UK. Since leaving research, he has devoted his career to publishing and training spheres. Harry has conducted 100+ workshops in person and online.
Dr. Harry Shirley
Editorial Development Manager, Springer Nature
Harry is Editorial Development Manager at Nature Portfolio and is an expert trainer for Nature Masterclasses. With strong scientific qualifications, he has almost a decade of academic research experience and multiple publications in chemistry. After receiving his doctorate, he worked in world leading research groups in Auckland, New Zealand and Oxford, UK. Since leaving research, he has devoted his career to publishing and training spheres. Harry has conducted 100+ workshops in person and online.
Sidney Engelbrecht is a bioethicist and experienced research ethics and integrity specialist employed as the Senior Research Compliance Specialist at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. He is a co-recipient of the Anderson-Kleinert Diversity Award at the World Conference on Research Integrity in 2024 and has received the Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Research Management Profession from the South African Department of Science and Innovation in 2020. His academic background includes Law, Philosophy, and Applied Ethics, from Stellenbosch University, with additional qualifications in Compliance Management from the University of Cape Town.
He co-authored papers, notably on the Nagoya Protocol, and edited and co-authored two chapters in the student course book on Jurisprudence for Laboratory Animal Technologists.
Sidney Engelbrecht is a bioethicist and experienced research ethics and integrity specialist employed as the Senior Research Compliance Specialist at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. He is a co-recipient of the Anderson-Kleinert Diversity Award at the World Conference on Research Integrity in 2024 and has received the Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Research Management Profession from the South African Department of Science and Innovation in 2020. His academic background includes Law, Philosophy, and Applied Ethics, from Stellenbosch University, with additional qualifications in Compliance Management from the University of Cape Town.
He co-authored papers, notably on the Nagoya Protocol, and edited and co-authored two chapters in the student course book on Jurisprudence for Laboratory Animal Technologists.
A NEW ERA FOR KAUST
Our unrelenting commitment to research, innovation and talent has seen KAUST establish itself as one of the leading research universities in the world, ranking #1 for citations per faculty globally, with a reputation for impact-driven research that contributes to the betterment of the world. This new era of KAUST builds on our many successes, achievements and strong foundations, and our new strategy represents an evolution that brings us closer to the interests of the Kingdom.
CONTACT US
For any inquiries, please contact us at academicevents@kaust.edu.sa.
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