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Sana’a University celebrated on Wednesday the achievements of three of its scientists, recognizing them for their positions among the top two percent of researchers globally, as listed by Stanford University.
Dr. Tariq al-Shami, an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics, received a certificate of appreciation and a cash award of one million Y.R for being ranked first in the field of most cited researchers throughout his career, maintaining this position for the fourth consecutive year.
Dr. Melhem al-Habouri, a faculty member at the College of Medicine and Health Sciences, was honored with a certificate and 750,000 Y.R for securing third place among the most cited researchers in the sub-field of Medical Biochemistry and in the broader category of Clinical Medicine.
Dr. Ali al-Muntasir, from the College of Education and Applied Sciences, also received recognition, earning a certificate and 500,000 Y.R for his third-place ranking among Sana’a University scientists and eleventh among researchers from Yemeni universities in the field of Physics and Astronomy.
During the ceremony, Dr. al-Qassim Abbas, rector of Sana’a University, commended the honorees for their exceptional contributions to scientific research. He announced that this recognition will become an annual tradition aimed at fostering scientific advancement within the university, with aspirations to elevate its standing among the world’s leading research institutions.
Dr. al-Qassim emphasized the university’s commitment to investing in scientific research and publishing, which had previously been overlooked. He noted that over the past four years, the university has provided grants to over 700 teaching assistants to enhance their research capabilities.
He also highlighted the importance of legislative measures to encourage publication and innovation among researchers, asserting that a focus on scientific inquiry is essential for national progress, especially in today’s technologically driven landscape.
In response, Dr. Ali al-Muntasir articulated that the honor signifies a pivotal moment in their scientific careers, reflecting years of dedication. He urged for the establishment of specialized research centers in various fields, including renewable energy and artificial intelligence, to further advance Yemen’s scientific endeavors and self-sufficiency.
Two years ago, Eqbal Dauqan was going to work in the morning as usual. She’s a biochemistry professor. And was driving on the freeway, when suddenly: “I felt something hit my car, but I didn’t know what it was because I was driving very fast,” she says.
Dauqan reached the parking lot. Got out of the car and looked at the door. What she saw left her speechless.
“A bullet hit the car, just on the door,” she says.
The door had stopped the bullet. And Dauqan was OK. She has no idea where the bullet came from. But it turned out to be an ominous sign of what was to come.
Gender Canyon
Dauqan is a female scientist in what’s possibly the hardest place on Earth to be a woman: Yemen.
The World Economic Forum ranks Yemen as the worst country for women’s rights. In Yemen, many women can’t leave the house without permission from a male relative.
“If she goes out with her husband or brother, that’s OK. But not by herself. ” Dauqan says. “Not everyone follows this. But this is our culture.”
A culture where two-thirds of women can’t read. About half are married by age 18 — and sometimes as young as age 8.
And then there’s the black veil. Many women in Yemen wear a niqab — a black veil that completely covers their faces,except for a tiny slit across the eyes.
Daquan wears a niqab when she’s in Yemen. She even wore one during her TEDx talk there back in 2014. But she doesn’t wear one in other countries.
“I cover my face [in Yemen] because I respect the culture,” Dauqan says. “I respect the culture.”
She may respect it — but not blindly. For the past decade, Dauqan has burst through glass ceiling after glass ceiling with fearlessness and grace.
Even as a young girl, she was a rebel. “I was a little naughty,” she says with a snicker.
She liked breaking rules. And proving people wrong. So when her parents told her she might not have the smarts to go into science and engineering — like her dad — Eqbal thought: Watch me.
“I told my father, ‘I’ve heard a lot about scientists in chemistry. What is the difference between me and them? So I want to try,” she says.
And she did more than try. She crushed it.
Eqbal won over her father and got his financial support. She was the first among her friends to finish college.Then she got a scholarship to do her Ph.D. in biochemistry at the Universiti Kebansaan Malaysia, where she studied the nutritional properties of palm oil.
That led to her writing a popular book about the fruits mentioned in the Holy Quran and their health benefits. For example, Indian Jujube — also known as red dates — are the most cultivated plant in the world and have 20 times more vitamin C than citrus fruit, Eqbal writes in her book.
Next came the prizes. In 2014, Dauqan was named one of the top female scientists in the developing world by the Elsevier Foundation. News programs in the Middle East and in China ran feature stories on her. She became so famous that Al Saeed University made her an assistant professor and head of a department — all this before she’d turned35. Dauqan was on top of the world.
And then one morning, it was all taken away.
“They were just sleeping”
In March 2015, Dauqan’s hometown of Taiz got pulled into Yemen’s bloody civil war. Planes started flying over head, dropping bombs — even on homes and schools.
“They were bombing my university!” Dauqan exclaims. “They killed some of my students.
“It was really bad. Really bad,” she says. “I’ll show you.”
Dauqan turns to her computer and brings up some photos. On the screen is a photo of several bodies laying flat on the ground. The bodies are covered in white sheets, with only their faces showing.
“This is nine person from my family,” she says. “They were sleeping. And a bomb hit their house. They all died. Nine person from my family.”
A few of the bodies are small.
“Those are two children in our family,” Dauqan adds. “They were just sleeping.”
And then they were gone — Dauqan’s cousins on her father side and their sons and daughters.
“That is why I leave my country,” she says.
“I have to be strong. I want to be strong”
After the bombings began, Dauqan had to stop her research. The university shut down. And it wasn’t safe for her to leave home. She was trapped in a city where snipers target children and bombs fall on mosques, schools and markets.
During one month of 2015, doctors treatedmore than 4,000 civilians in a Taiz hospital, the nonprofit Doctors Without Borders reported. MSF hospitals have been hit with bombs four times.
Across Yemen, about 10,000 civilians have been killed in the war and more than 40,000 have been wounded. the U.N. reports. More than 370,000 children are now malnourished because they can’t get food.
And then one day, after spending months in hiding, Dauqan had an idea: Maybe her science could get her out of the war.
She started texting her mentor, Aminah Abdullah, a food scientist at the Universiti Kebangsaan in Malaysia. They applied for a special refugee scholarship with the Institute of International Education-Scholar Rescue Fund, based in New York. She got it, and after a few months, she was safe on a plane headed for Malaysia.
Now she’s working to save up money so she can bring her parents and sister to Malaysia. “It’s very difficult,” she says. “But I have to be strong. I want to be strong!”
Dauqan works long hours in labs, continues to publish papers and mentor students. And she has never lost sight of her dreams — even her ultimate dream.
“My dream is to win the Nobel Prize,” Dauqan says with a chuckle. “It is very hard. So I don’t know. “
But Dauqan has already done so much for science — and society. When little girls in the Middle East see photos of Eqbal as a chemist — wearing a head scarf,measuring pH — they don’t need to use their imagination to think: “I could be just like her. I could be a scientist.”
source/content: npr.org (headline edited)
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“In college, I would tell my friends that I wanted to pursue a Ph.D., and they would chuckle and ridicule the idea,” says Eqbal Dauqan, who is an assistant professor at the University Kebangsaan Malaysia at age 36. Born and raised in Yemen, Dauqan credits her “naughty” spirit for her success in a male-dominated culture.Sanjit Das for NPR
The University of Rhode Island neurotoxicologist and dean came to the U.S. for college in the 1980s.
Nasser Zawia hails from Al Bayda, a town in the south of Yemen, a country that has long been affected by war and is currently experiencing widespread famine. Zawia traveled to the U.S. in the 1980s to earn an undergraduate degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He stayed in America, obtaining a PhD in pharmacology and toxicology from the University of California, Irvine. But Zawia never planned to stay on in the U.S. permanently. “Like many students who came here in the 80s, the objective was to come to go to school and go back to your home country and serve there,” he told The Scientist. “However, I married an American citizen.”
In 1990, Zawia and his wife moved to Yemen, where he planned to take a job at Sana’a University’s medical school. But the first Gulf War broke out in 1991. “The war was between Kuwait and Iraq,” he said. “But at that time, the position of the Yemeni government was supportive of Iraq. The connections with the U.S. were being threatened. I left during a climate where there was a lot of uncertainty and fear and insecurity as to what might happen.”
Returning to the U.S. in 1991, Zawia used connections he had made in US universities to secure postdoctoral positions at the University of South Florida and then at the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. After studying environmental toxicology at NIEHS, Zawia landed a faculty position at Meharry Medical College, a historically black college in Nashville, Tennessee, where he studied the developmental effects of lead exposure in minority populations. “I found that to be something where I could serve the underserved,” he said. “I stayed there for five years and then moved to the University of Rhode Island.”
Although he was successfully navigating the halls of academia and earning his citizenship in the early ’90s, life in the U.S. was not easy for Zawia. “The U.S. was not very receptive to people from the Middle East at that time because of the first Gulf War,” he recalled. “Those of us from that region of the world, our life is always punctuated by all kinds of events involving war. Every 10 years it seems like something big happens, which impacts us in many ways.”
The next big event that would have an effect on Zawia and countless other Americans happened on September 11, 2001. “Those of us who are Arab Americans/Muslim Americans in this country have always been dealing with wars and difficulties in our ancestral homes. But we didn’t ever think or expect that someone would come to the U.S. and cause such a catastrophe. And it changed our lives a lot. And everybody else’s,” he said. “But still we were Muslims in the U.S., and we had to deal with the Patriot Act and then the NSEERS [National Security Entry-Exit Registration System] registration for citizens coming from Muslim countries.”
Despite anti-Muslim sentiment spawned by the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Zawia chose to stay. Since setting up his University of Rhode Island (URI) lab in 2000, he’s made seminal discoveries, including research that pointed to a developmental basis for Alzheimer’s disease. He and his colleagues found that early exposure to lead increased the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease–related pathologies later in life. Zawia is now working on the epigenetics involved in this phenomenon, and said that his team is pursuing clinical trials of a repurposed drug to treat rare types of neurodegenerative disorders in Europe.
Although the Trump administration’s executive orders on immigration have restricted some travel for people from several countries in the Middle East, including Yemen, the policy has not directly affected Zawia, a naturalized US citizen. But both as a scientist who attends international conferences and as an administrator who seeks to entice talented students from all corners of the world to come to URI, he said he is seeing the damage the restrictions are having. “It is a concern for faculty here that were born in one of those seven countries,” he said. “Even though the law might be clear, how it’s applied may have an impact on our mobility.”
Zawia noted that the effects of the new immigration policies appear to be restricting the flow of students to URI and other US academic institutions. “In graduate education—especially in the STEM disciplines . . . we’re very heavily dependent on international students—it looks like huge drops in applications, a lot of concerns among our students on campus,” he said. “It just sends the wrong message. Graduate education is a strategic asset for the United States. Having the best minds come for an education here, staying, and interacting with our faculty and researchers is the secret to us always maintaining our leadership position.”
On top of the uncertainty surrounding his life as an immigrant researcher and administrator in the U.S., Zawia is grappling with an increasingly unstable situation in his home country, where some of his family still live: 19 million Yemenis are on the brink of a catastrophic famine in a country besieged by civil war. “My personal life and my connections to the country and my family have been upside down, to say the least,” he said.
With all that Zawia has witnessed in the U.S. as a Muslim Arab-American, he views the current political and social climate as the most damaging he’s seen. “I feel the impact of what’s going on now is much greater than what we experienced in the ’90s, with first war in Iraq or 9/11,” he says. “What’s going on right now is really very unsettling and very worrisome. Past events and past wars had more of a selective impact on us as Middle Eastern people and Muslim Americans. But the changes this administration is bringing about in many different facets of life is really . . . disrupting a lot.”
source/content: the-scientist.com / bob grant (headline edited)
