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This is a new consecration for Tunisia on an international scale. This is the International Exhibition of Inventions Geneva 2023, one of the largest events dedicated to invention organized by the World Intellectual Property Organization and the Swiss government. Two gold medals were awarded to Erij Messadi, researcher, and Mounir Bezzarga, professor, for their inventions.
Tunisia causes a stir with two revolutionary inventions
The two Tunisian winners were distinguished among a total of 1,000 other inventions from 50 different countries, thanks to the gigantic potential of their projects.
Dr. Erij Messadi, representative of the Institut de Pasteur, presented a one-of-a-kind project at this prestigious event. Baptized “Lebecetine, Lectin type C, as an inhibitor of neovascularization”, it was able to capture the attention of the public and was able to win the gold medal with congratulations from the jury. His innovative invention aims to demonstrate the crucial role of Lebecetine in blocking the formation of new blood vessels, which could slow the progression of several diseases such as cancer.
The ImmunoDefender project won in the Q category. Designed and produced by Dr. Mounir Bezzarga to fight against COVID-19, this winning invention continues to receive awards and shine on an international scale. After winning a prize at TICAD and another at the Euro-Mediterranean Intellectual Property Conference, this plant-based project was on the way to winning the gold medal with congratulations from the jury at the Geneva fair.
Beyond the obstacles, Tunisia continues to shine
Despite the turbulent political scene and the difficult economic situation, Tunisia continues to shine thanks to the exploits of its talents. Indeed, the country is always represented on the podium of international events, especially those dedicated to technologies and inventions. Tunisian inventors like Erij Messadi and Mounir Bezzarga are often awarded for their inventions covering several fields. All this bears witness to remarkable innovation and dynamism on the Tunisian scene.
This immense potential can only be an incomparable asset for our Tunisia. The future therefore looks promising in this area.
Trailblazing Jordanian-British research fellow reveals that her prescription for success requires dispensing – but only with tradition.
Most Damascene moments are dramatic by definition but few occur, as Atheer Awad’s did, on an actual road that leads to the Syrian capital.
Her own turning point came when the vehicle she was travelling in with her family to register for university in Amman blew a tyre, hit an electricity pole and flipped several times.
The accident meant that Awad ended up in hospital and missed the window to sign up to study medicine. By the time she was discharged, the only degree option still open to her was pharmacy.
Though bitterly disappointed at the time, she has come to believe that there were greater forces at work on the day of the crash on Jordan Street.
“Let’s just say we put our car to the test,” Awad tells The National. “It was a complete wreck. We are lucky to be alive.
“But it wasn’t meant to be that I should study medicine. I took the car accident as a sign that the future held better things for me.”
As a result, she was steered into an unexpected career in which the eventualresearch fellow at University College London would amass numerous accolades: the Journal of Clinical Medicine‘s 2021 PhD Thesis award; an appearance on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for Europe; reaching the finals in the Women of the Future awards 2022 in the science category; named as an International Pharmaceutical Federation FIPWise Rising Star for 2022 as well as one of the top 15 outstanding innovators under the age of 35 by the MIT Technology Review.
Her groundbreaking research is paving the way towards the creation of personalised medication that can be 3D-printed in patients’ homes via smartphone — a potentially transformative innovation for those who find it hard to gain access to health care or don’t suit a one-size-fits-all service.
Born in Abu Dhabi and raised in Dubai by Jordanian parents, her hand was always first in the air in class when volunteers were sought to dissect animals at Al Mawakeb School in Garhoud.
It was an early display of Awad’s enthusiasm for the sciences, particularly biology, and a prelude to her ambition of becoming a heart surgeon.
“I was so determined to make a difference and medicine is one of those industries that has a greater impact when it comes to changing people’s lives,” she says.
“There is never a boring day with science because every day is a new learning experience.
“You come across things that you haven’t discovered before or create new stuff by just playing around with things in the lab and mixing them together. It’s that sort of curiosity that motivates me.”
Back then, holidays were regularly spent visiting Jordan — trips that Awad still makes annually to catch up with extended family, go to weddings and indulge a soft spot for the local food.
“I love those traditional connections,” she says, “and still follow as many of these practices as I can, wherever I am.
“My faith helps a lot. But it isn’t easy trying to keep a balance between sticking to faith and being able to live in a foreign country.”
Moving to England wasn’t as daunting as it might have been without the unwavering support of her parents and four older siblings — a pharmacist, a consultant with whom she lived until recently, an IT specialist and a doctor.
“It is rare for all of us to be in the same country at the same time,” she says, laughing. “We travel between the three countries and there is always at least one of us living in each of the three. That makes it interesting for my parents, who get to travel everywhere.”
Awad herself, now 29, is a keen traveller and has put on her bucket list the wish to visit every country in Europe before turning her sights to other continents.
She fell in love with Turkey after a trip to Cappadocia, the semi-arid central region known for its “fairy chimney” rock formations, and particularly enjoys explorations on foot.
London, however, holds a special place in her heart, where there is, she points out, a big Jordanian community.
“I have a lot of friends I consider my second family. They’re a mixture of scientists, people outside work, and others with Jordanian or Arab heritage. That keeps me connected to my roots and it is one of the beauties of London — it’s international.”
But she calls Dubai home and makes many happy returns to Living Legends, a newly developed 14 million-square-foot community on the outskirts of the city where her parents still live.
Part of the appeal of the emirate, it should be said, is the chance to hit the luxury shops. Dior and Prada are favourites — her handbag collection alone extends to “about 40 or 50 … I’ve lost count” — and the Swarovski-encrusted mobile phone she takes everywhere is a particularly prized purchase.
Invariably, though, one of the first stops is to fill up on luqaimat, known as awama in the Levant. She has sampled the sugary doughnuts wherever she finds them but maintains that the ones whipped up for as long as Awad can remember by her mum, Hanan Swais, “are the best”.
They were an abiding taste of a childhood in which the extroverted Awad, left to explore her own interests by her father, Jamal, an electronics retailer, and Hanan, a homemaker, played the piano exuberantly if not with any notable proficiency and went on Scouting expeditions.
There was never an expectation that she would follow in the footsteps of any of her siblings but the desire to pursue medicine was strong nonetheless.
“It wasn’t until we were discharged from hospital [after the car accident] that I realised I had missed the deadline,” she says. “There was no going back in time. I just thought: ‘What’s the next best option?’
“That’s why I always say I did not choose pharmacy — it chose me.”
Despite a reluctant start, Awad’s enthusiasm grew throughout a five-year degree at the private Applied Science University in Amman as she gained insight into the extent of what pharmacists could actually do.
“I started looking at pharmacy as having a bigger impact than I had previously thought,” she says.
“People sometimes look at pharmacists as if they are beneath or less important than doctors when, in fact, they do most of the work behind the scenes.”
Little by little, with the consolidation of hours of satisfying sessions spent researching in laboratories or learning about the differences in the properties of various drugs, it dawned on Awad that she had stumbled across her calling.
Which is not to say that she appreciated being treated as little more than a saleswoman while doing work experience in a community pharmacy during the degree course.
“People assume that the pharmacist just takes the prescription and gets the medication without doing anything else,” she says. “There is a misconception.”
The experience hardened Awad’s resolve to focus on research rather than the direct, community-facing side of the profession.
After graduation in 2015, she embarked on a master’s in pharmaceutics and drug design at UCL, where she learnt about 3D printing during an end-of-year project with her professor, Abdul Basit.
She was inspired to keep working with the Basit Research Group within the School of Pharmacy to undertake a doctorate specialising in using the drug-delivery technology in the manufacture of medicines.
“I’ve always been interested in technology so it grabbed my interest immediately,” says Awad, who is still a research fellow with the group.
Weekends when she is not working are spent dining with friends, indulging her obsession for Harry Potter — “I’ve watched all the films multiple times” — and baking. Coffee cake is her speciality and made a well-received appearance at her professor’s 50th birthday.
“I do like experimenting with baking and cooking. I think there are similarities between baking and science.”
She doesn’t rule out applying to appear on The Great British Bake Off television show but, for now, Awad’s ambitions are confined to the lab.
“I want to make a change,” she says. “I don’t want 3D printing to stay a theory. I want to see it being implemented and taken up by healthcare agencies.”
Most recently, Awad has been printing tablets with Braille and moon patterns on their surfaces for visually impaired patients, or changing their shape, size and colour so that children or those with limited capacity find them easier to take. She has also been researching how to combine several medications into a single pill.
One of her team’s successes has been in creating tablets that can be swallowed without water. Manufactured in partnership with pharmaceutical 3D-printing specialist FabRx by melting powder particles with a laser beam and using heat, the porous product dissolves on the tongue.
She talks about how 3D printing allows alterations of a fraction of a milligram, making medication much more tailored and precise than the standard variety available off the shelf.
“Every person is different and our bodies do not react the same,” Awad says. “The requirements when it comes to medication differ, and sometimes they differ within the same person, depending on the disease progression.
“We can also take patients’ preferences into consideration. That’s important when it comes to children or elderly patients. Often children refuse to take medicine because they don’t like the taste, the shape isn’t appealing or the pill might be too big.”
While 3D printing for customised pharmaceuticals has yet to be introduced commercially in the UK, Awad’s UCL team has managed to convert a smartphone into an on-demand 3D drug printer with an app that could be used in remote GP surgeries and even at home.
“We’re not far from the industry adopting 3D printing, probably in the next two to five years,” she says. “Approval will have to be on a medication-by-medication basis because each medicine could behave differently to the same technology, depending on its properties, and the 3D-printing technologies themselves differ.”
Awad’s passion for her work is tangible. The British-American analytics company Clarivate clearly thought so when last month listing her on its influential Highly Cited 2022. It was a remarkable achievement for such a young scientist to appear among fewer than 0.1 per cent of the world’s researchers across 21 fields.
Such recognition is welcome but, she says, the many “titles are more of an assurance that I am on the right track and that my work is important”.
“That’s the driving force to keep me moving forward and become even more ambitious to try new things,” she says.
One of her guiding principles is that researchers should be brave and adopt different approaches because even the most “ridiculous” ideas can be turned into brilliant inventions or innovations.
As she has been known to opine, not all scientific breakthroughs happen through planned research: “Sometimes, you come across things by accident.”
Given the route into her career in pharmaceuticals, it could be said that Awad started very much as she meant to continue.
Stanford University, one of the world’s leading research and teaching institutions, published its annual “World’s Top 2% Scientists” list — featuring the most widely cited scientists in different disciplines — this week.
It included five faculty members from Riyadh’s Imam Mohammad bin Saud Islamic University: Dr. Rafiq Muhammad Choudhry and the late Dr. Hisham El-Dessouky from the department of engineering; Dr. Kamal Abdul Jawad Buradah and Dr. Ahmed Al-Khayyat from the department of science; and Dr. Qaisar Abbas from the department of computer science.
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Highlight:
The ‘World’s Top 2% Scientists’ list includes Dr. Rafiq Muhammad Choudhry and the late Dr. Hisham El-Dessouky from the department of engineering; Dr. Kamal Abdul Jawad Buradah and Dr. Ahmed Al-Khayyat from the department of science; and Dr. Qaisar Abbas from the department of computer science.
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The university’s president, Dr. Ahmed bin Salem Al-Amri, said that the university’s recognition is a sign of the support that education and research receives from the Kingdom’s leaders.
“The leadership gives special attention to scientific research as a key pillar of the university’s success and a developmental and community-based necessity to transform universities into (places) that serve the development of the knowledge economy, by improving scientific research and its quality and outcomes in order to positively impact the economy and society,” he said.
In recent years, the university has dedicated “specialized programs and quality initiatives as part of its strategic plan to achieve the goals of scientific research and innovation,” and to improve the Kingdom’s ranking in the Global Competitiveness Index, thus achieving the goals of Saudi Vision 2030, Al-Amri explained.
source/content: arabnews.com (headline edited)
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Stanford University, one of the world’s leading research and teaching institutions, published its annual “World’s Top 2% Scientists” list. (Reuters/File Photo)
As a child in Tunisia, Lina Necib watched the 1997 film “Contact” and decided to become an astrophysicist. Now at MIT, she studies dark matter’s shadowy clues.
Lina Necib is on the hunt for something invisible.
“It’s a little bit like detective work,” she says. “We have a lot of observational types of evidence, and we’re trying to put all of it together into one picture.”
Necib, an assistant professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studies dark matter, the elusive stuff that makes up most of the universe’s mass but doesn’t reflect, emit, or absorb light. For her work, Necib has won the 2023 APS Valley Prize, which recognizes early-career physicists for research expected to have a dramatic impact in the field.
In 2020, Necib and her colleagues reported their discovery of a massive stellar stream, a ribbon of stars left over when a galaxy is torn and stretched, orbiting on the outskirts of the Milky Way. Dark matter tugs at these streams, leaving behind fingerprints — evidence of its existence.
Necib believes the stream, dubbed “Nyx” after the Greek goddess of night, might be the remnant of a dwarf galaxy that collided with the much larger Milky Way billions of years ago. To study the stream, her team merged particle physics with cosmological simulations, data from star catalogs, and machine learning — a groundbreaking combination of tools. They published their results in Nature Astronomy.
Necib credits a few other physicists for her successes — “in particular, several women,” including Anna Frebel and Tracy Slatyer at MIT and Mariangela Lisanti at Princeton University.
Mentors as much as colleagues, these women helped Necib adjust to her new faculty role at MIT, which she started during the pandemic and with a newborn baby, she says.
Necib grew up in Tunisia, a small country on Africa’s northern coast, where she says she regularly faced sexist expectations for girls’ behavior and ambitions. One night, when Necib was 8 years old, her family settled in for a movie. The selection? “Contact,” starring Jodie Foster, who plays a scientist searching for aliens. The film opened Necib’s eyes not only to the field of astrophysics, but to a world in which a woman could do astrophysics.
By the end of the movie, Necib had made up her mind: “I’m going to do that!”
She set her sights on college in the U.S. As an undergraduate at Boston University, she leapt into diverse research opportunities, conducting resonance testing of graphene and even joining the search for the Higgs boson at CERN. Her interest in dark matter grew.
During her senior year, at an open house hosted by MIT’s physics doctoral program, Necib struck up a conversation with Jesse Thaler, a theoretical particle physicist. By the end of the chat, Necib knew she wanted to be at MIT.
Necib ultimately asked Thaler to be her dissertation advisor. “He was so enthusiastic about the work that he did. He loved it so much — it was kind of contagious,” she says. “Having an advisor who really put in the time and effort to help me become the physicist that I am changed my life.” Necib earned her doctorate in 2017.
Now in her second year as an assistant professor at MIT, Necib hopes to change cultural attitudes about science careers in Tunisia, where certain professions are given more weight. She wryly summarizes this ranking, starting with the best: “Doctor, engineer, lawyer, failure.”
To topple these perceptions, Necib recently teamed up with Rostom Mbarek, another Tunisian physicist and the Neil Gehrels Prize Postdoctoral Fellow at the Joint Space-Science Institute. The duo just launched an astrophysics podcast entirely in Tunisian Arabic.
In her MIT classroom, Necib strives to debunk outdated perspectives on who does physics.
“I did this experiment last year in one of my first-year physics classes where I asked my students to name physicists,” she recalls. “And all the names they came up with were Nobel Prize winners, but they were also all the same old, Albert Einstein-like examples.”
After that session, Necib had her class learn about more recent work, including the contributions of women and scientists of color to the field.
One of Necib’s “students” is particularly young. Her 17-month-old son can’t yet say “dark matter,” but he has the children’s book “Astrophysics for Babies,” and they go on excursions to Boston’s Museum of Science. He’s a bit young for the exhibits — “he’s just impressed with the escalator,” she says — but she hopes that early exposure will instill in him a love for science.
Meanwhile, her search for dark matter continues. She says that, if someone else solves the mystery of dark matter before she does, it won’t phase her. For her, being a physicist is “really about the people,” like her colleagues, mentors, and students.
“I know amazing people that are doing incredible work,” she says. “Feeling that my work is recognized fills me with so much joy. I hope to pay it forward.”
The Iraqi scholar Suhad Yasin has waged a long battle against financial and administrative obstacles to continue her work on purifying polluted water.
Her graduate studies started later than most and became a long journey over 13 years of dropping out and restarting, but she persevered. Two years ago, the University of Duhok awarded her a doctorate in polymer chemistry.
Now Yasin works from an independent laboratory she set up at the University of Duhok, where she and her students use cheap, available materials to treat polluted water.
Iraq, like many Arab countries, suffers from water scarcity and stress. One study predicts the Tigris and Euphrates rivers will dry up completely by 2040.
Apart from the scarcity issue, some Iraqi waterways also face problems with contamination by heavy metals like aluminum, cadmium and chromium, adding urgency to research like Yasin’s.
An Interrupted Academic Journey
In an interview with Al-Fanar Media, Yasin described her career in industry and academe.
After obtaining her bachelor’s degree in chemistry at the University of Mosul in 1993, she joined a laboratory in a local pharmaceutical factory, eventually becoming production manager.
As violence increased in Mosul over the next decade, however, Yasin was forced to return to her family’s home city of Duhok in 2006. She got an administrative job at the Ministry of Industry of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.
But she did not find administrative work satisfying, Yasin said, so she took a competitive exam to study for a master’s degree at the University of Duhok.
By then a wife and mother, Yasin faced challenges in studying at the University of Duhok, both with learning in English and in overcoming the skepticism of some academics. Her thesis supervisor questioned her ability to complete the work. “He told me, ‘I regret being involved in the supervision of your thesis. It will be difficult for you to complete your studies at your age because of your family responsibilities.’”
But Yasin said his words only increased her motivation. “I needed to prove to my supervisor and myself that I was not a problem, but an energetic researcher who had missed an opportunity,” she said.
Yasin got her master’s degree with excellence in 2009 with a thesis on removing chromium from water using modified pomegranate peel .
Starting from Scratch on a Ph.D.
She then applied to transfer from her job at the ministry to work as an assistant teacher in the chemistry department of the University of Duhok’s Faculty of Science.
She taught at the University of Duhok for six years but was not given an opportunity to pursue a Ph.D. because the university lacked facilities and funds for research in her specialisation. Throughout this time, she continued her research on purifying polluted water.
In 2015, the university offered her an opportunity to pursue a doctorate and she took it. There was considerable opposition to her studying for a Ph.D. at the age of 50, but she managed to convince the head of the department.
Based on the advice of her master’s supervisor, who had changed his mind about her ability, she chose nanofiber technology as the subject of her doctorate. Her new supervisor initially opposed the idea, saying the university could not afford the materials required for research on this topic. But he finally relented when she persisted.
Yasin said she had nothing but the lab walls when she started her doctoral research: no equipment, devices, or “cofactors”, molecular compounds needed in certain chemical reactions. “The resources were almost zero,” she said. “I had to buy everything myself and start from scratch.”
Lining up Support
Yasin contacted professors and scholars from various Arab countries to ask for help. By chance, she heard of a physics professor at the University of Basrah who had designed a device that would help her with her research. “I contacted the professor at the University of Basrah immediately and she agreed to help me,” Yasin said.
Yasin then had to convince her dean at the University of Duhok to manufacture a similar device so she could work. He agreed, but she still needed funding for her research.
She wrote to several international organisations asking for financial support and eventually received a three-year grant of about $207,000 from the National Academy of Sciences in the United States, in 2018. She used the money to establish an independent laboratory at the University of Duhok to conduct her research on using nanomaterials to treat water.
Yasin acknowledges that funding scientific research is a general problem in Arab countries, but she insists that scholars themselves have a duty to find funding for their research.
“We must not stand idly by. I work day and night to get new financial support,” she said. “With each refusal, I realise that I have to work more.”
Suhad Yasin, of the University of Duhok, overcame many obstacles during 13 years of interrupted graduate study to continue her research on purifying polluted water. (Photo courtesy of Suhad Yasin)
The Jordanian pharmacologist Nancy Hakooz has been chosen as the first recipient of a prestigious new prize for a scientist from a developing country, given by the International Society for the Study of Xenobiotics.
The society, known as ISSX, is the premier scientific organisation for researchers who study how organisms metabolise and dispose of xenobiotics. Xenobiotics are compounds that are foreign to an organism or are not part of its normal nutrition. Examples include drugs, food additives, and environmental pollutants.
The new prize, called the Award for Outstanding Achievement in Xenobiotic Research by a Scientist from an Underrepresented Nation, will honour researchers either for a single major contribution to research in the field of xenobiotics, or for significant sustained contributions over time.
Hakooz, a professor of pharmacogenetics in the University of Jordan’s School of Pharmacy, was chosen to receive the inaugural award “in appreciation of her efforts in studying the effect of genes on drug response, and her studying the genes of genetically isolated peoples such as the Circassians and Chechens in Jordan.”
She will receive the award at the society’s international conference in Seattle in September
In an interview with Al-Fanar Media, Hakooz said it was important for Arab scientists to be represented in international scholarly societies like the ISSX. “We have distinguished research in this field, despite the lack of capabilities,” she said.
A Practical Element in Her Research
During her research career, Hakooz has focused on practical aspects of the topics she studies, such as how genetics affect the appropriateness of certain drugs for specific patients.
“Not all patients benefit from the same drug or the same dose, since there are genetic differences between people,” she said.
“If we can study the effect of these differences on the effectiveness of a drug in patients, then the prescription for each drug will be different from one person to another,” she said. “This is called personalising medicine, meaning that the drug is provided in accordance with each patient’s condition.”
Studying a Subject She Loved
Hakooz says she chose to study pharmacy “out of love and conviction.” She had many choices of what to study at university, she said, because her excellent grades in high school. “However, I was satisfied to study what I really loved.”
After she received her bachelor’s degree in pharmaceutical sciences from the University of Jordan in 1992, Hakooz worked for a year as a teaching assistant in the School of Pharmacy. She then got a scholarship to study for a doctorate at the University of Manchester, in the United Kingdom.
She obtained her Ph.D. four years later, specialising in drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics, the branch of pharmacology concerned with the movement of drugs within the body.
Challenges for Arab Researchers
After returning to the University of Jordan in 1997, Hakooz tried to work on research similar to her studies at the University of Manchester, but she ran into difficulties for lack of funding and support. She needed lab animals, she said, but their cost was very high, and it was not easy to obtain them in Jordan at that time.
The lack of sustained funding is one of the major challenges facing scientific research in Jordan, she said. Others include the lack of a group research culture, in which scientists exchange advice and knowledge.
When she first returned from abroad, Hakooz said, she found researchers working on isolated “islands”. However, things have become better in the last ten years, with much better collaboration among research groups, she said.
To have a group culture, she tells young researchers, it is not a requirement that all of them do the same type of research, but that they support each other through research participation, each in their own discipline.
Medicinal Clinical Trials in Jordan
Despite these challenges, Hakooz believes Jordan has a great opportunity to become a regional centre for clinical studies of new drugs. Jordan has distinguished, globally recognised research centres that could participate in such studies, she said.
Pharmaceutical companies need to conduct clinical trials of new medicines in more than one place to collect data on a drug’s effectiveness and safety, Hakooz said.
An important question, she said, is, “How similar are the genetics of the people who participate in drug trials?”
Being able to answer that question will allow researchers to say whether the drug will be just as effective when it is widely circulated, she said. “The answer may be positive or negative. In order to be sure, we must participate in those experiments.”
Women in Higher Education
In addition to conducting research, Hakooz has held several administrative positions in her academic career.
She served as the founding dean of the Faculty of Pharmacy at Zarqa University, in northern Jordan, between 2010 and 2016. She was also a vice president of the university for three years during the same period.
In 2016, she returned to her alma mater, the University of Jordan’s School of Pharmacy. Four years later, she become the head of the college’s department of biological and clinical pharmacy.
On women’s leadership in Arab higher education institutions, she said: “In our country, administrative positions are granted, not acquired, and are not open to competition.”
“At the University of Jordan, for example, we have one female vice president compared to four male vice presidents, and three female deans compared to 21 college deans,” she said.
“Academic leadership positions in public universities are governed by a permanent factor, which is personal acquaintances because they are governed by appointment.”
“Administrative positions in academia come and go,” she added. “My genuine passion is teaching and seeing my students’ eyes shine when they catch a new idea.”
After being chosen for a prestigious international award, the Jordanian scientist talked to Al-Fanar Media about her work and the challenges for researchers in the Arab region. (Photo: Nancy Hakooz).
Sarah Al Amiri, Minister of State for Advanced Technology and Chairwoman of the UAE Space Agency, has been named as one of Time’s 2021 list of the Next 100 Most Influential People in the World for successfully leading the UAE’s Hope Probe into Mars’ orbit, in the first-ever Arab interplanetary mission.
In addition to her work in sending the Arab world’s first spacecraft to Mars, Al Amiri is now ahead of bigger missions: to lead ambitious space and technology projects that contribute to the UAE’s bigger goal in establishing a knowledge-based economy. A lunar mission in 2024 and plans to build a human settlement on Mars by 2117 are among the ambitious projects that await the young minister who’s looking to promote research and development to create new industries as part of her role.
She took part in building the UAE’s first two satellites – DubaiSat-1 and DubaiSat-2, and the first entirely Emirati-made KhalifaSat.
She has been holding several responsibilities as the Chairwoman of the Emirates Scientists Council, Chairwoman of the Fourth Industrial Revolution Council and Chairwoman of the Dubai Future Academy Board of Trustees.
In 2017, she became the country’s first Minister of State for Advanced Sciences, a title that later changed in the latest cabinet reshuffle in August 2020 to the Minister of State for Advanced Technology. She was also then named the Chairwoman of the UAE Space Agency.
In 2015, the World Economic Forum honoured her as one of its 50 Young Scientists for her contributions to science, technology and engineering.
She was also invited by the World Economic Forum to speak at Davos 2019 and became the first Emirati citizen to speak at an international TED event in 2017.
Mostly recently, she was selected in the BBC’s 100 Women 2020, a documentary that highlighted women leading change and making a difference during last year’s turbulent times.
