KU Times | Issue 9

Issue 9 I Nov 2020

Amna Nasser Ahli, Future Doctor Helping Advance the UAE’s Health Sector Khalifa University Researchers at ARIC Developing ‘Reusable Mask’ as Potential Replacement for N95 2019 Khalifa University Faculty Excellence Award Winners YFEL Members Take Part in Various Summer Workshops About Sustainability

21 Khalifa University Students Participate in Virtual Study Abroad Program Amidst COVID-19 Outbreak

MBZIRC Inspiring Solutions To Important Robotics Challenges with Special Journal Edition

Khalifa University strives to provide its students with different learning opportunities to enhance their educational experience.

The dust may have settled in the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC) arena but the ingenuity and ambition demonstrated by the teams competing continues.

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Contents

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Khalifa University, UAE Space Agency and YahSat in 3-Way Funding Agreement to Establish ‘Khalifa University Space Technology and Innovation Center’

Open Access (OA) publishing removes the price and access barriers to academic literature.

Internships Go Digital Amid the Coronavirus Pandemic

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18 54 64

104

Shrinking Images for Efficient Transfer and Storage with Memristors

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RESPONDING TO COVID-19

Khalifa University Researchers Develop ‘Biodegradable’ and ‘Biocompatible’ Environ-Friendly Anti-Viral Adaptive Face Mask

A PATENT LICENSE IS ALREADY FILED FOR NAVAMASK, THE FULLY ‘BIODEGRADABLE’ AND ‘BIOCOMPATIBLE’ NOVEL ANTI-VIRAL ADAPTIVE FACE MASK DEVELOPED BY KHALIFA UNIVERSITY RESEARCHERS, WITH NANOFIBERS, AND HAS STRONG ANTI-MICROBIAL PROPERTIES.

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A team of researchers at Khalifa University has successfully developed the first working prototypes of NavaMASK, a fully ‘biodegradable,’ ‘biocompatible,’ environment-friendly, and novel anti-viral adaptive face mask with nanofibers that will have strong anti-microbial properties. The researchers have already filed for a patent license for the mask’s bio-material.

NavaMASK will offer excellent breathability with strong antimicrobial properties and can be washed and reused several times prior to eventual disposal.

RESPONDING TO COVID-19

In addition, the mask is a great candidate for safe disposal to the environment because of its biodegradability and biocompatibility.

The project was the fruit of a collaboration between Khalifa University and University of Salerno, Italy.

Dr. Arif Sultan Al Hammadi, Executive Vice-President, Khalifa University, said: “The innovation of biodegradable NavaMask reflects not only Khalifa University’s continuous commitment to finding solutions that directly contribute to serving the society, but also the result of the University’s funding of 14 research projects directly related to mitigating the pandemic.

This innovation reaffirms our research efforts to develop areas that focus on issues related to the community in general, especially those that help find a solution to COVID-19.

Research initiatives at Khalifa University are directed by prominent faculty experts, with the help of state-of-the-art labs and advanced on-campus facilities.”

Prof. Vincenzo Loia, Rector, University of Salerno, Italy, said: “The University of Salerno has a consolidated experience in interdisciplinary research at an international level. The quality of our international research and its ability to serve the real needs of the society, yearly reconfirm the accreditation of the University of Salerno in prestigious academic rankings.

NavaMask is an additional effective example of a research idea that was born in a laboratory capable to support accurately and promptly the big challenge associated with the complex period we are experiencing, combining innovation and environmental sustainability.”

Dr. Vincenzo Naddeo, Director, Sanitary Environmental Engineering Division (SEED), University of Salerno, Italy, said: “From early stages of the COVID19 outbreak, the Sanitary Environmental Engineering Division (SEED) of the University of Salerno has promptly reconverted the laboratory activities to support national industries in the testing of respiratory devices according to international standards. Since March 2020, the SEED becomes one of the first official hub for face mask testing in Italy and in Europe. NavaMASK is an

innovative and sustainable solution in response to the strong demand for protective face masks from society and governments. Our experience in the field has contributed to the optimization of a novel biodegradable filtration material which will be useful for the design of the next generation of face masks. Additionally, in this project we have developed a novel international protocol for rapid and cost-effective testing of face masks.”

The project at Khalifa University is led by Dr. Shadi W. Hasan, Associate Professor and Theme Lead, Center for Membranes and Advanced Water Technology (CMAT); Dr. Faisal Al Marzooqi, Assistant Professor; Prof. Fawzi Banat, Professor and Chair of the Chemical Engineering Department; and Dr. Musthafa Mavukkandy, Post-Doctoral Researcher, Chemical Engineering.

Dr. Shadi W. Hasan said that the team envisioned the NavaMASK on the belief that there was a crucial need for an environmentally-friendly alternative to the currently available face masks, while maintaining the highest safety and breathability standards for humans. The complete biodegradable filtration materials were carefully selected to provide effective protection, avoid skin irritation, and most importantly be safe to our environment. The face mask will have perpendicularly arranged nanofibers with a diameter ranging between 100 and 600 nm to pass air through but reject particles, bacteria, and viruses. Its strong antimicrobial properties will ensure >99% removal efficiency of bacteria, thus NavaMASK is expected to compete and outperform many of the existing facemasks in the market.

Dr. Musthafa Mavukkandy said that numerous optimization experiments were carried out to capture the right recipe of all ingredients of the face mask filtration bio-material.

The Khalifa University researchers are currently planning to start Phase II, which will aim to introduce a new secondgeneration design for the NavaMASK and maintain high removal efficiency, high comfortability, easier breathing, and fewer layers. Most importantly, it will reflect the UAE’s efforts in advancing the field of innovation.

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RESPONDING TO COVID-19

Khalifa University Research Team Develops New Portable CostEffective PCR Test To Help Detect COVID-19 in 45 Minutes RNA replication process. While laboratory PCR tests require a programmable thermocycler, LAMP can be carried out with a simple heat block, making it much more amenable to portable testing.

As complicated as this sounds, it’s all completed within the device and needs minimal knowledge to operate. For the KU testing kit, there is no need for any sophisticated equipment as the kit performs Covid-19 detection directly from a patient’s swab. A simple color change shows the result: pink for negative, yellow for positive.

A TEAM OF RESEARCHERS FROM KHALIFA UNIVERSITY HAS DEVELOPED A PORTABLE COVID-19 TESTING KIT, NO LARGER THAN YOUR AVERAGE SMARTPHONE. THE NEW KIT IS BOTH PORTABLE AND CAN DELIVER THE RESULTS IN 45 MINUTES ONLY.

Dr. Anas Alazzam, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and member of the System on Chip Center (SOCC), is the primary investigator for the project with Dr. Habiba AlSafar, Director of the Khalifa University Center for Biotechnology and Associate Professor of Genetics and Molecular Biology, as co-principal investigator. The research team includes the Postdoctoral Researchers Dr. Waqas Waheed and Dr. Sueda Saylan, along with Research Associate Hussein Kannout.

While PCR testing is always highly accurate, and the gold standard for detecting viruses, it can be complex to use. The researchers at KU used the Loop-mediated Isothermal Amplification method (LAMP) to provide a rapid, sensitive, and specific detection of the Covid-19 virus. It is faster than the conventional PCR method and uses primers that target two specific regions of the viral RNA. The majority of PCR methods rely on thermal cycling where the reactants are exposed to repeated cycles of heating and cooling to start the

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Currently in the clinical validation stage, this testing kit can detect active infections in 45 minutes, meaning it can be used in rapid testing while being cost-effective at the same time.

When the coronavirus pandemic is over, the kits remain useful, as they can be used with any virus detecting primer. The LAMP method will still replicate the RNA to make it testable and then the sample can be tested with a reagent looking for the influenza virus, for example.

Primers to detect an infectious agent can be produced quickly once the viral sequence is known, so if a new virus were to emerge, this PCR test from the team at Khalifa University would be able to detect it.

challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. This is also a key part of our strategy to move research projects to relevant services that aim to contribute to the joint efforts of government and private stakeholders towards restricting further spread of the virus.

We hope, as the official testing center, the BTC will offer testing for the community and increase UAE’s testing capacity.”

Khalifa University’s Center for Biotechnology Receives DoH License for On-Campus COVID-19 Testing Facilities KHALIFA UNIVERSITY ADDS ROUTINE COVID-19 TESTING TO ITS LIST OF VIRAL TRACKING CAPABILITIES TO ASSIST IN MITIGATING THE SPREAD OF DISEASE

Khalifa University’s Center for Biotechnology (BTC) has been licensed by the Abu Dhabi Department of Health (DoH) to serve as an official COVID-19 test center. The service is linked to Malaffi, a centralized database of real-time public health information, and to the Alhosn app, the official COVID-19 results and contact tracing app for the UAE. KU has thus become the first university in the UAE to open an on-campus COVID-19 testing center for its students and employees, in line with its utmost priority on health and safety. Since the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak, research teams at the university have been working on diverse ways to assist with tracking and mitigating the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Researchers at the BTC have developed a range of competencies including sewage testing to gauge the level of infection in community groups, validating viral testing kits and genome sequencing to track the source and spread of viral infections.

For some time, the BTC has been conducting COVID-19 tests for research purposes and

the license approved by DoH means that it can now offer a routine diagnostic service and another testing center is now available to assist health authorities manage the pandemic. The BTC testing center will routinely report to the DoH operations center. The BTC has now upgraded its laboratories to include a routine diagnostic arm, to further increase the nation’s testing capacity, if required. The BTC has already passed the proficiency test by the Abu Dhabi Quality and Conformity Council.

Dr. Ahmed Al Shoaibi, Senior VicePresident, Academic and Student Services, Khalifa University, said: “We are proud to be the first university in the UAE to open an on-campus COVID-19 testing facility for our students and employees, which reflects our highest priority on health and safety. In addition to implementing the hybrid learning system and taking adequate measures to ensure the safety and health of students, without compromising the quality of education and research, Khalifa University also places significant emphasis on their overall academic and individual development, so that they evolve into full-fledged professionals in science, technology and engineering areas. At the same time, Khalifa University and its research centers, have remained at the forefront in tackling the

The BTC team which works with clinical scientists, medical technologists and pathologists, has quickly expanded the capabilities of its laboratories to accommodate a routine diagnostics service. In order to act as an official COVID-19 testing center, it had to fulfill the full requirements imposed by the Abu Dhabi DoH. Dr. Habiba Alsafar, Director, BTC, said: “The center has a-state-of-the-art molecular genetic laboratory which spans every basic competency from DNA and RNA extraction to next generation sequencing. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, the BTC laboratory has had to pivot very quickly and add two arms to its research capability, namely diagnostics and manufacturing services. These capabilities give decision-makers a string of competencies that they can call on to manage the current and future disease outbreaks. There is definitely room to grow and include more and diverse testing capabilities in the future. We hope this will allow us to respond quicker in the future and reduce the impact of new events.”

Dr. Alsafar is already leading a multidisciplinary team from Khalifa University to work with universities across the globe and investigate how the COVID-19 virus, usually found in animals such as bats, has jumped to humans. Earlier, the BTC joined with its partners to successfully manufacture reagents for extraction of COVID-19 RNA, over the course of just two weeks, as part of its contribution to help the nation overcome the current impact of COVID-19.

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RESPONDING TO COVID-19

Khalifa University Researchers at ARIC Developing ‘Reusable Mask’ as Potential Replacement for N95

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3D PRINTING TECHNOLOGIES HELP INCORPORATE VARIOUS DESIGN, ERGONOMIC AND SUITABILITY ASPECTS FOR EASY MANUFACTURE AND REPEATED USE

RESPONDING TO COVID-19

A team of researchers at KU’s Aerospace Research and Innovation Center (ARIC) is in the process of developing the design of a ‘Reusable 3D Printed Mask’, as a potential replacement for standard N95 masks that are in short supply following the COVID-19 pandemic.

The team is currently developing various aspects of the design, taking into consideration requirements including filtration performance, geometry/fit, flexibility, material suitability for medical applications, and manufacturability. Medically graded materials were used in the manufacture of the components.

A prototype has already been printed and once completed, an assessment will be performed before it gets qualified and approved.

The N95 respirators and surgical masks (face masks) are personal protective equipment (PPE) that protect the wearer from airborne particles and from liquid contaminating the face. They are critical supplies for health care workers and other medical first responders.

Dr. Arif Sultan Al Hammadi, Executive Vice-President, Khalifa University, said: “Community-relevant research has always remained a key pillar of our strategy and we are keen to offer our resources to support R&D in this area, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. The current situation is unprecedented in history, and has created challenges that require smart scientific solutions through innovation. We believe through the research work at ARIC, we would be able to offer a suitable solution to tackle the challenges posed by the pandemic and protect our frontline defense with this mask.”

As a leading research center focused on advanced manufacturing and robotics, ARIC helps to develop efficient techniques for manufacturing advanced structures and novel procedures for the automated manufacturing and assembly of aerospace components.

Over the past five years, ARIC has completed nine main industryfocused projects, 28 student-led projects involving 65 UAE national students, several patented innovations, and more than 30 academic publications in reputed research journals.

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RESPONDING TO COVID-19

An Insight into the Population’s Understanding of Coronavirus Through Social Media Analysis

EBTIC RESEARCHERS HAVE DEVELOPED TOOLS TO COLLECT AND ANALYZE TWEETS ABOUT CORONAVIRUS IN FOUR DIFFERENT LANGUAGES TO IDENTIFY TRENDS AND PATTERNS AMONG THE POPULATION OF THE UAE.

In a world where more than 500 million tweets are sent every day, there is little doubt that social media platforms such as Twitter are vital to understanding the zeitgeist. As the novel coronavirus swept the globe and developed into a pandemic, social media offers an instant insight into how Covid-19 is impacting a population.

There have been over 628 million tweets about coronavirus so far. Understanding their content and the sentiment behind their messages is crucial to assisting policymakers and, in the case of Covid-19, identifying where public health messaging can be improved. Social media is an instant way of spreading information and knowledge, and provides a snapshot of a population’s understanding and feelings about a topic for analysts to investigate.

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Researchers from Emirates ICT Innovation Center (EBTIC) have developed tools to collect and analyze tweets about coronavirus in four different languages to identify trends and patterns among the population of the UAE. Mr. Ahmad AlRubaie, EBTIC Head of Strategy and social media research, collaborated with Dr. Di Wang, EBTIC Chief Researcher, Dr. Ahmed Al Dhanhani, EBTIC Senior Researcher, and Hamda Al Ali and Sara Al Shamsi, both EBTIC Research Associates, to produce a series of dashboards for monitoring Covid-19 tweets.

Extracting useful information and making use of it is the challenging part of any analysis, and being able to automate the processes using machine learning techniques will allow the approach taken to be used across many application areas and in difficult times, such as during a global health pandemic.

RESPONDING TO COVID-19

“The two main components we developed are harvesters and classifiers,” explained Mr. Al-Rubaie. “Then, we used open source visualization tools to show the outcome of the analyses we performed in real time and in short time scales.”

EBTIC has developed ‘harvesters’ that can harvest tweets in real time. As soon as someone tweets about coronavirus, the EBTIC harvester collects it. But recognizing the content of a tweet when it doesn’t actually contain the word ‘coronavirus’ can be difficult for a human, let alone a machine. So EBTIC also developed a number of classifiers using artificial intelligence to sort tweets into pre-defined categories.

“We can categorize content through machine learning and for different use cases, primarily Arabic and English text, but also Hindi and Urdu for our coronavirus analysis,” explained Mr. Al-Rubaie. “We focus on short text messages, such as tweets, because tweets provide near instantaneous insight into the population views and opinions. However, it’s much more challenging than longer text content. Short text tends to include a very limited amount of information, grammar errors, spelling mistakes, and sometimes content that is specific to a user.

These challenges make accurate classification of short text difficult.”

The researchers used their harvesters to collect tweets and then trained their classifiers on these tweets to organise them into pre-defined categories: symptoms, health advice, health news, lockdown, and other. The classifiers used both shallow learning and deep learning AI techniques to classify the tweets, achieving high accuracy in a short time compared with other state-ofthe-art techniques. The researchers also developed preprocessors to improve the classification accuracy even further.

The team also developed an intelligent method to detect and measure change in key terms used in social media per hour, per day and per week.

“Our method automatically detects the key terms with highest usage in social media to quickly identify any changes in user interest and discussion topics. We also

identify sources driving discussions and whether they are official trusted sources, or private individuals, which is the foundation for our work on misinformation detection. This method is key for monitoring the impact that Covid-19 is having on the population through time,” said Dr. AlDhanhani.

This data is visualized through a number of dashboards, highlighting important patterns and trends in the information. Data visualization uses visual elements like charts, graphs and maps to provide an accessible way to see and understand information and data. In the world of Big Data, these tools and technologies are essential to analyzing massive amounts of information and understanding trends and patterns in the data.

The researchers also developed harvesters to gather relevant information from the internet, such as the number of Covid-19 cases reported and the price of various goods and products sold online.

“We also collected information on Covid-19 cases announced by official sources in the UAE and plotted those against the trends from social media,” said Dr. Wang.

“We use the graphs to plot the key topics of interest and the change in conversations on social media through time. This helps to highlight what type of information is important to the public and at what time. We can also gauge the level of conversation in line with the cases being announced.”

Collecting information on the prices of food and other products sold online may seem incongruous to the thoughts and feelings of people on social media, but these data can highlight interesting trends among the population. A quick look at the dashboards not only shows correlations between social media discussions and the number of cases, but also valuable trends, such as the stability of the essential food market and the property market throughout the pandemic.

“We can provide an insight to the impacts of the pandemic on essential food prices and even property prices in the region, simply by plotting key trends against the number of tweets and their contents,” explained Mr. Al-Rubaie.

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RESPONDING TO COVID-19

Predicting the Impact of Covid-19 With Mathematics

In an effort to understand the dynamics of the Covid-19 outbreak, a team of researchers led by Dr. Dimitris Goussis, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Khalifa University, is developing mathematical tools to support the analysis of numerous Covid-19 transmission models already in use. The findings are expected to support public health policies and efforts to tackle the virus’ spread and its impact on society.

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RESPONDING TO COVID-19

Mathematical models try to forecast things such as

and varicella-zoster virus. Compartmental models

how a disease spreads, the total number infected

simplify infectious disease modeling by assigning the

and the duration of the epidemic. They can estimate

population to various compartments with different

various epidemiological parameters. For example,

labels.

they can predict the range of values that might vary the reproductive number – a term that indicates how

The simplest compartmental model is the SIR

contagious an infectious disease is. They can also assess

epidemiological model involving Susceptible,

the influence of different public health interventions in

Infectious and Recovered labels. It is considered to

controlling the outcome of the epidemic.

be quite effective at predicting the spread of humanto-human infectious diseases. More detailed models

“We’re planning on developing mathematical tools

involve more compartment labels, such as Exposed,

for identifying the degree to which various factors

Quarantined or Asymptomatic infected.

(like, social distancing or recovery rate) influence the development and control of the Covid-19 outbreak, and

“A major portion of the Covid-19 literature is based

how they may prevent its resurgence,” explained Dr.

on compartmental models,” explained Dr. Goussis.

Goussis. “This work will be based on existing and widely

“Among the various features addressed are the

used simple compartmental mathematical models,

international spread from Wuhan, the prediction of the

which are frequently used in analyzing diseases spread

reproduction number and the assessment of travel

by the transmission of viruses, bacteria or fungi.”

restrictions in reducing the number of infected cases,

Dr. Goussis’ team will apply their analysis to existing

and the effect the virus has on different age groups.

disease models, including the compartmental models

All of these works have addressed features of the

used to assess disease impact. Timescale analysis leads

problem, like profiles of the infected population, but

to deeper understanding by identifying the components

have not examined the dynamics of the process and

of the model that drive the system and those that are

especially the issue of the timescales characterizing

unimportant. In this way, the team can assess which

the various phases of the outbreak.”

interventions are most beneficial to reducing disease spread, among other things.

“Given a model, timescale analysis reveals the mechanisms that control the evolution of the

Compartmental models for disease modelling began

system,” said Dr. Goussis. “Our work will identify the

with Nobel Prize winning research on the transmission

components of the model under consideration that

of malaria in African countries, early in the 20th century.

control the dynamics of the outbreak’s evolution and

They have also been used recently to assess the impact

its possible resurgence; i.e. the contact rates, the

of vaccination against polio, Ebola and measles, and to

infectious periods, and the impact of relaxing social

study the spread of dengue fever, swine flu, norovirus

distancing.”

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MY CAMPUS, MY COMMUNITY

Student & faculty achievements, and campus activities

Khalifa University Conducts Successful Professional Development Week for over 200 Faculty and 400 Students

KU’s Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) held its second annual Professional Development Week from 17 August to 21 August 2020. The virtual PD week was full of interactive workshops and presentations designed to promote participants’ personal, academic and career growth.

The week kicked off with a welcoming speech from Dr. Arif Al Hammadi, KU’s Executive Vice President. He praised the KU community’s efforts to overcome the many obstacles caused

by COVID-19.

The PD Week offered a variety of sessions for faculty, staff and students including extensive training on Blackboard, KU’s new learning management system. More than 200 faculty and 400 students attended various topics during the event ranging from Innovation through Integration to Online Learning Opportunities for faculty and students.

KU’s Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) held its second annual Professional Development Week from 17 August to 21 August 2020. The virtual PD week was full of interactive workshops and presentations designed to promote participants’ personal, academic and career growth.

The week kicked off with a welcoming speech from Dr. Arif Al Hammadi, KU’s Executive Vice President. He praised the KU community’s efforts to overcome the many obstacles caused

by COVID-19.

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MY CAMPUS, MY COMMUNITY

The PD Week offered a variety of sessions for faculty, staff and students including extensive training on Blackboard, KU’s new learning management system. More than 200 faculty and 400 students attended various topics during the event ranging from Innovation through Integration to Online Learning Opportunities for faculty and students.

Plenary speakers included Dr. Stephen Krashen, Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Southern California (USC), Dr. David Marsh, Director, Innovation & Outreach, EduCluster Finland, University of Jyväskylä Group, Finland, and Dr. Elaine Gallagher, Educational Consultant. Their presentations titled, “Innovation through Integration, Fundamentals of Language Acquisition,” “Writing: Will more writing make you a better writer?” “The Effects of Globalization on Education in the 21st Century,” and “Developing Critical Thinking Skills,” were well-received by faculty and students, who commented on the breadth of knowledge and experiences of these internationallyknown educators.

From KU, Dr. Hassan Barada, Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies, College of Engineering, presented on ABET and Learning Outcomes, while Dr. Curtis Bradley, Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies, College of Arts & Sciences, along with some Lab Teaching Staff, shared how they delivered their lab sessions using virtual labs during the pandemic. Sofiane Benna, Director of IT, shared IT services for faculty and students and John Radkowski,

Director of Research Services, explained the process of research proposal submissions.

Participants received first-hand, world-class reports on how to implement teaching techniques based on empirical research to achieve success in teaching and learning.

Undergraduate and postgraduate students presented in several sessions during the PD Week sharing their experiences in tutoring their peers in the Learning Centers, sharing their final projects from a leadership course, and from a teaching certificate course for Teaching Assistants.

Faculty gained insights from the students’ perspectives.

Given that COVID-19 has closed schools in 160 countries, affecting more than one billion students worldwide, it is imperative that we become aware of, and involved in, transformation occurring in education systems, which must depend on distance learning finding common ground in the impetus required for the transformation of our educational processes.

KU’s PD Week was aimed to inspire faculty and students, and instill in them a sense of motivation to get recharged and ready for the new academic year. It was an opportunity for the KU community, faculty and students, to exchange knowledge, experiences, and interact with each other.

CTL is planning to host another successful and memorable PD week in the Spring.

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KU Faculty Presents Paper in Webinar Hosted by Queen’s University Belfast Matthew Andrew, Preparatory Program Lecturer, was invited to take part in a webinar in July hosted by Queen’s University Belfast on the theme of “Innovations in Feedback and Assessment since COVID-19”. The webinar was part of a Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and Language Education series attended by professionals, academics, and students in the field. The purpose of the event was to discuss two papers which explored shifting assessment and feedback towards digital environments in the current COVID-19 era of online learning and assessment.

Matthew presented his paper on the use of multimodal texts for learning and assessment based on survey data,

Dr. Steve Takes Part in Panel Discussion on Energy Transition Opportunities Dr. Steve Grifffiths, Senior Vice-President for Research and Development, was a featured speaker on the Middle East Energy Transition Dialogues podcast series on 23 June 2020.

The podcast, hosted by Gulf Intelligence, invites experts to

interview data, and student digital

discuss the trends affecting energy transition from across

examples from participants in two English

the region and around the world. Dr. Steve’s episode focused

Communication courses at KU. As part

on energy transition opportunities as countries slowly ease

of the research, students created two

out of COVID-19 lockdown restrictions.

multimodal projects: 1) A webpage on Google Sites including writing and research tips; and 2) A video connected to a semester-long research project.

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LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

MY CAMPUS, MY COMMUNITY

YFEL Members Take Part in Various Summer Workshops About Sustainability

Multiple online summer workshops were organized for the members of the Young Future Energy Leaders (YFEL) program to keep them engaged with interesting topics related to sustainability and renewable energy.

The YFEL program is an initiative led by Khalifa University to inspire, engage, and empower the youth to be tomorrow’s leaders in alternative energy and sustainability. The program brings together promising students and young professionals from the UAE and around the world to learn, exchange ideas, and become future energy industry leaders.

SATELLITE DEVELOPMENT The first workshop was about the “Life Cycle of Satellite Development” conducted by Dr. Prashanth Marpu, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Manager of the YahSat Space Lab at Khalifa University. Dr. Marpu talked about the basics of satellite design and the various steps in the life cycle of satellite development. He also discussed his satellite development experience working on the MYSat-1 and MYSat-2 satellites.

WASTE MANAGEMENT The second workshop was titled “Waste Management and Waste to Energy,” which was conducted by Dr. C. Srinivasakannan, Professor of Chemical Engineering. The course provided an overview of the growing waste problem in developing societies and the role of waste management in minimizing negative impacts.

THE ROLE OF POLICY At the fourth workshop, Dr. Toufic Mezher, Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering, talked about “The Role of Policy in the Renewable Energy Industry”. Dr. Mezher discussed strategic frameworks for managing high-technology businesses. The workshop highlighted the importance of acquiring powerful analytical tools that are critical for the development of a technology strategy as an integral part of business strategy.

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DESIGN THINKING FOR SUSTAINABILITY The last of the summer workshops was on “Design Thinking for Sustainability” conducted

by BASF Executive Dr. Udo Huenger, Vice President, Middle East and other BASF trainers. BASF is a multinational chemical company and the largest chemical producer globally. During the workshop, the YFEL members learned about the basics of design thinking and how it can be applied to real-life sustainability challenges. The workshop also talked about how it helps to be inspired and create new ideas and solutions by combining feasibility, viability, and desirability.

YFEL members from all over the world participated in the online workshops.

“The program proves the commitment of the leadership at Khalifa University to prepare and equip young talent with the necessary tools for a more sustainable world. This has been done using a diverse selection of workshops as well as the irreplaceable experience of participating in the World

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Future Energy Summit - Abu Dhabi 2020.” - Khalifa Sameh Khalaf Mohamed Aldhaen “Personally, I really enjoyed learning about satellite development, because of my previous interest in aerospace engineering. It was also nice to know more about the role UAE is playing in this field. On the other hand, the practical experience with logic programming given by the robotics workshop was very interesting too.

And finally, the leadership workshop gave me some fruitful insights on my leadership profile by learning about different types of leadership and example cases.” - Laura Suárez “The workshops planned for YFEL were very diverse and interesting.

It helped me gain knowledge about environmental topics and also exposed me to robotics and coding in an easy and enjoyable manner, thanks to Dr. Hamad Karki, since I thought such topics were difficult and perplexing.

From these seminars, I gained new insights of different existing sectors and projects in the UAE, as well as enhanced my skills in leadership, projecting my ideas, and public speaking with the help of Mr. Kevin Garvey’s enthusiastic lectures.” Maithaa Almazrouei

MY CAMPUS, MY COMMUNITY

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MY CAMPUS, MY COMMUNITY

Khalifa University Participates in Youth Focus Group Workshop on Environmental and Climate Policy

Khalifa University faculty Dr. Hector Hernandez, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, and Dr. Riaan van der Merwe, Assistant Professor of Civil Infrastructure and Environmental Engineering, represented the University in an online workshop on Wednesday, 1 July 2020, organized by the Ministry of Climate Change and Environment (MOCCAE) to discuss the Ministry’s upcoming UAE National Environmental Policy.

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The main purpose of the focus group was to meet with academic research faculty and students to: (1) understand what research programs are currently in place in the respective universities’ research groups and departments; (2) find out what are the potential future areas of academic research for the UAE; and (3) identify what programs need to be supported and implemented by the MOCCAE to achieve these academic research objectives.

MY CAMPUS, MY COMMUNITY

During the meeting, they discussed the MOCCAE’s commitment to developing a datadriven approach to addressing emerging climate change challenges in the UAE. The Ministry’s national environmental policy will focus on the following:

BIODIVERSITY

MARINE AND COASTAL ENVIRONMENT

CLIMATE CHANGE

AIR QUALITY

FOOD SAFETY

AGRICULTURE

ANIMAL WELFARE AND DEVELOPMENT

CHEMICALS MANAGEMENT

WASTE MANAGEMENT

The attendees were also asked to share research programs they are currently working on in their laboratories and institutions, as well as identify emerging areas of research that would specifically support the MOCCAE and benefit the UAE. Dr. van der Merwe and Dr. Hernandez were able to highlight several of their projects during the workshop.

Dr. Van Der Merwe mentioned that he is currently developing projects on marine and coastal environment, including projects titled “Shifting the discharge mindset from harmful to habitat: exploring inventive designs and benefits of underwater discharge structures for fish habitat enhancement” and “Use of unmanned aerial systems to promote water resources management in the agricultural sector”.

Dr. Hernandez also shared his current projects, including one that is focused on establishing a halophyte breeding program in the UAE; the Green Barjeel project, which he is working on in collaboration with the MOCCAE; and Green Chemistry 2.0, which focuses on remediation of persistent environmental organic pollutants and in which he is CoPI with Dr. Sharmarke Mohamed, Assistant Professor of Chemistry. He also talked about future projects under development in agriculture, including a project titled “UAE native microalgae as a renewable source of feed stock for animal feed in the United Arab Emirates and “Mining UAEnative halotolerant microorganisms for promoting plant salinity resistance.”

At the end of the workshop, the participants were asked to provide recommendations of programs that both the Ministry and academia can implement to be able to support the UAE National Environmental Policy.

The focus group was also attended by other faculty from the American University Sharjah, Sharjah University, and United Arab Emirates University.

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21 Khalifa University Students Participate in Virtual Study Abroad Program Amidst COVID-19 Outbreak Khalifa University strives to provide its students with different learning opportunities to enhance their educational experience. For Summer 2020, KU planned to send 100 sophomore and junior students in a study abroad program to ten prestigious universities in the United States where they were to spend the summer semester taking classes and experiencing living abroad in the diverse environment of these top universities. The main goal of the program, called Sufara 2020, was to add to the students’ well-rounded education, exposing them not only to new classroom experiences but also cultural experiences at other campuses. It was also going to be an opportunity for the students to broaden their network and develop professional relationships.

And then COVID-19 happened. The whole world was at a standstill as everyone dealt with the pandemic. With international travel restrictions in place, the original plan to send students was put on hold. However, 21 students were determined and rose to the challenge, deciding to continue with the program, albeit virtually. They have been attending summer online classes at Stanford University, Boston University, UCLA, and Arizona State University.

The virtual classes still offer an exciting learning opportunity for the students.

Shouq Derzada is enrolled at Stanford University, taking a course called Understanding

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MY CAMPUS, MY COMMUNITY

Energy and Sustainability Design Thinking. “I

Ghalia Hamad Al-Qawadi Al-Hammadi, a Biomedical

knew that this experience would be challenging

Engineering student, chose to enroll in Boston

considering the current pandemic situation, but I’m

University because of the university’s excellent

also certain that it will be valuable,” she said.

biomedical sciences program. She is currently taking two classes, Biology and Behavioral Biology

She explains why she chose to take a course on

of Women.

energy: “One reason why I became interested in understanding energy is that energy has the most

“My participation in the program will bring me a

influence in climate change and it is indeed the

lot of advantages and help me in my studies in

main driver for human development. As a chemical

the future, especially that the two courses I have

engineering student, this course would help me

chosen are the basis of my field and they are

further understand the fundamentals of each

taught theoretically and practically with the best

energy resource as well as the potential conversion

specialists in the field of biomedicine, which will

processes and technologies. I have always been

strengthen my foundation in my field in addition

passionate and curious about energy and its

to the strong experience that I gained from my

resources. And I decided to take the sustainability

university. More than that, distance learning under

design thinking course since the world nowadays

these conditions with one of the best universities in

is seeking sustainability in all aspects of life. This

the world will be a strong and distinctive addition to

course would help me to learn design thinking

my CV,” she said.

techniques to promote sustainable design of products.”

Fares Aljaberi is taking a Materials Science class in University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA). For

“I consider myself lucky to be part of such a

him, the virtual classes can be challenging. “There

valuable program that allows me to experience

are some difficulties that we face, which are paying

new ways of learning, get to know new people, be

attention, understanding, and participating. It has

exposed to different cultures, develop new academic

been harder to work on these three things during

skills, and enjoy this opportunity,” Shouq added.

the online courses, but hopefully things will be better,” he commented.

Omar AlRemeithi has also chosen to take classes at Stanford University. From the very beginning, he

Despite the unique circumstances, the students

had a definite plan of what he was going to take.

are excited and eager to learn new things. Omar

Omar chose classes that complement the courses

particularly enjoys the “Virtual Residence Hall”

he is currently taking at KU.

experience at Stanford where he can virtually meet with his classmates and participate in different

“I am taking Signal Processing and Linear Systems

activities. And although they are not able to

I, which is equivalent to Signals and Systems

experience life at other campuses, the students still

at Khalifa University. Also, I’m planning to take

have gained additional knowledge and developed

Machine Learning as a technical elective,” he said.

new connections.

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Internships Go Digital Amid the Coronavirus Pandemic Despite the global lockdown caused by coronavirus, Khalifa University’s Career Services Office has successfully placed 330 of its undergraduate students into a virtual internship program this summer.

The students will be interning at major public and private organizations that reflect the critical sectors of the UAE economy, including, but not limited to, local organization such as ADNOC, the Dubai Police, DEWA, Tawazun, Du, Ministry of Education, Halcon, General Civil Aviation Authority, Ministry of Infrastructure and Development, AD Municipality, DP World, and Ankabut, and international organizations such as Children’s National, Diehl Group of Companies, CAE, Lockheed Martin, Thales, Solarship Ins, Ureka, and TOKA. The internship experience is a core part of Khalifa University’s curriculum, and it is also a requirement for graduation. Internships offer students a unique opportunity to acquire critical skills and knowledge that they wouldn’t realize inside a classroom, while giving them the chance to put theory to practice.

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The traditional internship had to go through a major conceptual change to be transformed into a virtual internship program. Industries, hosting companies, eligible students and faculty had to be introduced to the new concept. However, the resulting virtual internship program that has been developed seems to have paved the way for deeper partnership opportunities with new industries and companies at both the local and international levels.

The dedication of the Career Services team has ensured that each eligible student was placed in a high-quality virtual internship, where they will experience a wellrounded, memorable and inclusive work experience that will provide them with lifelong skills. Student internships are a cornerstone of the KU student experience, and Career Services oversees this activity to increase employment rates of KU graduates. Other initiatives of the Career Services Office include Majors Day, Career Development Course, CV Clinic, Career Fair, Internship Fair and Alumni engagement.

MY CAMPUS, MY COMMUNITY

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

Amna Nasser Ahli, Future Doctor Helping Advance the UAE’s Health Sector her groupmates saw that there is a need for advanced diagnostic tools that will help screen the population and in turn reduce the risk factors that can result in thyroid cancer for patients that are susceptible to this disease.

When asked what she wants to do in the future, Amna Nasser Abdullah Ali Ahli said she wants to focus on helping to improve the country’s medical sector.

Amna graduated with a Biomedical Engineering degree with honors at Khalifa University and is currently a medical student at KU, pursuing her dream of becoming a doctor. Even during her undergrad days, she has always been interested in medicine. In fact, Amna, together with her teammates Fatima Yousif Alshamsi, Sarah Ismail Alali, and Tamader Omar Alhouqani, under the guidance of Dr. Habiba Alsafar, Associate Professor of Genetics and Molecular Biology and Director of the Center for Biotechnology (BTC), developed the Thyroid-on-a-ChiP device to help people make decisions that can prevent and/or treat thyroid cancer. This innovative device was one of the projects that secured funding and support from the Expo 2020 University Innovation Program (UIP) of Expo Live.

Thyroid cancer is the third most common cancer type prevalent in the UAE. Amna and

“Thyroid-on-a-Chip is a project that I worked on and am still working on with my colleagues at KU. After assessing the need in the UAE and by knowing that thyroid cancer can be caused by environmental factors, we developed a personalized diagnostic tool designed to look for biomedical markers in the human body that indicate if a person is susceptible to developing thyroid cancer. This diagnostic tool is specific to the Emirati/Arab population as we are studying biomarkers in Emirati patients only,” explained Amna.

“I am so proud of what we have established, and so honored that our project was chosen as one of the top projects presented. And I am very glad that Dubai Expo Live2020 funded our project, because the UAE is developing rapidly, and developing the medical sector is essential to provide a better healthcare for the patients,” she said.

“I have a biomedical engineering background and I am now studying medicine. This has made health and patient care important to me. If I will work on future projects, it will always combine both my biomedical engineering and medical backgrounds toward finding solutions to help patients and improve the medical sector of the UAE,” Amna revealed.

Amna admits that KU has been an integral part in helping her achieve her dream. “In my long journey at KU, I can describe it as a place where I can explore all my possible potential and move forward with them. It has made it possible for me to study medicine and make my lifelong dream come true. Also, as KU is ranked as the #1 university in the UAE, it makes me so proud that I get to study here.”

“I am also very lucky to be part of the first batch of the MD program at KU, it is unique and the only one in the country. This program has made it possible for me to continue my journey in medicine.”

Khalifa University’s College of Medicine and Health Sciences offers a four-year Medical Doctor (MD) program that incorporates an innovative curricular design and employs a variety of education strategies that blends problem-based learning and clinical experiences to enable students gain the competencies expected of all physicians. KU’s MD graduates will be fully prepared to enter residency training in any specialty anywhere in the world, with the ultimate goal of being able to seamlessly integrate technology into the delivery of personalized, preventative healthcare.

“I believe KU is very successful in establishing this unique program and it will create physicians who are at the same level of competency with the best and most prestigious medical programs worldwide. I highly appreciate the support our leaders have given this program to make it possible and successful.”

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Abu Dhabi University, American University of Sharjah, Sharjah University, and Al Ghurair University. During the event, Trojan showed the students the different work processes and phases involved in construction. The virtual on-site visit took place on Abu Dhabi’s “Water Edge” development at Yas Island, to help students understand and visualize the construction phases.

KU Student to Participate in Trojan Young Engineers Internship Program

BSc Electrical Engineering student Khawla AlMarzooqi was chosen to take part in Trojan Holding’s Trojan Young Engineers Internship Program.

Trojan Holding is a UAE-based construction company that has grown not only in the country but globally as well with projects across the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. The company’s Trojan Young Engineers Program is a CSR initiative that aims to host engineering students from different universities in the UAE to spend one day with Trojan’s in-house engineers and experience dayto-day activities at actual construction sites and gain insight on how working in a construction company will be like after university.

Last 23 June 2020, Trojan held an online event to kick off the 4th cycle of their Trojan Young Engineers Program. The event was attended by students from five universities, namely Khalifa University,

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Five internship slots were given to the students who performed well in the assessment conducted by Trojan after the online event to gauge the students’ knowledge and understanding of the construction process.

“I feel really exhilarated and proud to be chosen as one of the interns to participate in the program. This program was introduced to five universities. Out of all the students in those universities, Trojan selected five lucky students to intern in their program and I was one of those students. Honestly, I never thought I’d be hand-picked by Trojan for such an opportunity,” commented Khawla.

“I’m really excited about all the hands-on experience I’ll gain from this internship!

It would be great to see the theoretical knowledge I’ve gathered from my Electrical Engineering degree utilized and integrated in construction work,” she said.

Trojan’s Young Engineers Program supports the UAE’s 2021 Vision of creating a sustainable, knowledgebased nation by educating, training, and preparing young engineers who are shaping the future of the UAE.

MY CAMPUS, MY COMMUNITY

KU Participates in NEA Mission to UAE

Khalifa University’s Dr. Arif Sultan Al Hammadi, Executive Vice President, Dr. Steve Griffiths, Senior Vice President of Research, and Dr. Phillip Beeley, Former Professor and Chair of the Department of Nuclear Engineering and Director of the Emirates Nuclear Energy Center (ENEC), participated in the Nuclear Energy Agency’s (NEA) virtual mission to the UAE on 17-18 August 2020, along with representatives from the Federal Authority for Nuclear Regulation (FANR) and the Ministry of Energy and Industry (MoEI). They discussed opportunities for the UAE to engage more deeply with the NEA, an intergovernmental agency that facilitates co-operation among countries with advanced nuclear technology infrastructure to seek excellence in nuclear safety, technology, science, environment and law.

KU’s Red Crescent Club Wins Aoun Award for Community Service 2020

Khalifa University’s Red Crescent University Club is this year’s recipient of the illustrious Aoun Award for Community Service – Higher Education Category.

This award is a program of the Emirates Red Crescent to encourage the Emirati youth to help the community and instill in them the culture of volunteerism.

With support from the Student Success Department, KU’s Red Crescent University Club was able to create a portfolio of humanitarian initiatives that revolves around the theme “Using technology we learn from the safety of our homes.” The initiatives developed were specifically geared toward helping underprivileged students access resources to optimize their learning experience.

One of the remarkable achievements of the Club was helping a refugee center in Abu Dhabi set up their distance learning program. They built a website for the center and created official email accounts for the students and administrators.

They also assisted in training the center’s administrative and academic staff on how to use the different distance learning platforms.

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The Club, in cooperation with the Emirates Red Crescent Authority and other donors, was able to provide 19 new tablets to the students in the refugee center. Before distributing the tablets, the Club members formatted and programmed the devices to ensure that they were ready to be used by the students for their studies.

Another initiative of the Club was launching a “learning” platform that is open for all students around the world. The site offers different learning tools and resources such as tutorials, online courses and workshops, study guides and resources for different subjects, and even an online chat room where students can meet other students who have the same majors or interests.

The Club also conducted two workshops, “Effective Tools to Improve Your Studies and Achieve Success” and “Digital Aids to Enhance Your Study Experience”, to enhance students’ study experience. To accompany the workshops, they also developed comprehensive digital guides that students can easily refer back to whenever they need.

The Club continues to provide online lectures and training courses for students and teachers as well to introduce the most effective tools and applications to support distance learning.

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MY CAMPUS, MY COMMUNITY

Majed Abdullah Abbod Bin Saad, President of the Red Crescent

inspiring the students’ sense of social responsibility, and encouraging them to

University Club, said:

invest both energy and time to serve the society.

“Despite the challenges imposed on the Red Crescent Club of Khalifa University by these exceptional circumstances, the club managed to receive the first place of the Aoun Award. This is, if anything, proof of the members’ determination and their willingness to invest their time and efforts to create a better tomorrow for a better society.

“I am proud to say that in our first participation we’ve achieved more than 40 different accomplishments and completed more than 800 volunteering hours to ensure that our initiatives serve the target group enduringly.

“I’d like to thank the Red Crescent for their unfailing efforts to instill the values of volunteering in the hearts of our youth through the Aoun Award.

I would also like to thank Khalifa University for supporting our initiatives,

“Our club will continue launching its innovative initiatives and programs thanks to our distinguished members and university who always strive to achieve more.”

Majed’s dedication to the club is admirable as he leads and inspires his fellow club members to imbibe the value of volunteerism. Majed is also one of the recipients of the Sharjah Award for Voluntary Work 2020 for his volunteer efforts.

To learn more about the Red Crescent University Club or if you want to participate in their activities, you may visit their website: http://bit.ly/rcc_website.

VISIT THEIR WEBSITE

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Khalifa University Faculty Share Their Expertise at the Arab Gulf Teachers Forum

Our University faculty were among the experts who conducted workshops and shared their knowledge on specific topics during the 6th Arab Gulf Teachers Forum that was held on 24-25 August 2020 and organized by Abu Dhabi’s Ministry of Education. The online forum, under the theme “Education for Quality of Life,” focused on highlighting the role of education in developing the learners’ personal skills in parallel with academic and scientific skills, and at the same time reinforcing their interest in adopting a balanced lifestyle characterized by excellent psychological, social, mental, and physical well-being.

The goal of the forum was to motivate school communities to adopt different aspects of qualityof-life practices to enrich the

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teaching and learning process with quality practices that enhance positive attitudes toward achieving the learning outcomes in a changing international environment.

As the top-ranked university in the UAE, Khalifa University is dedicated to sharing knowledge and expertise not only within the KU community but also to the local and global communities that we serve.

Dr. Ahmed Al Shoaibi, Senior Vice President, Academic and Student Services, was one of the speakers in the opening session of the forum entitled “Hybrid Learning: A New Direction in Education.” The session discussed the advantages of the hybrid learning, the smooth transition from traditional learning to hybrid learning, effectively using educational platforms for hybrid learning, and the expected positive impacts of hybrid learning on the quality of education in UAE schools.

Other KU faculty were also able to impart their expertise to help educators utilize all the resources that they have to provide learners with a full and comprehensive learning experience.

Dr. Nader Ayish, Assistant Professor of the College of Arts and Sciences, talked about the role emotional intelligence plays in developing empathy among children and adults.

Dr. Siobhan O’Sullivan, Program Director of Medical Education, spoke about students being creators and curators of knowledge and promoting

collaborative learning in an online environment. The workshop of Dr. Abdulhadi Shoufan, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, focused on learning management systems (LMSs) for distance and life-long education and how to address the limitations and challenges of LMSs. And Dr. Dymitr Ruta, Chief Researcher at EBTIC, and Dr. Asli Hassan, Center for Teaching and Learning Director, presented the concept of EduSense, a comprehensive system of detecting and measuring factors that affect student performance. They shared with the participants several case studies in higher education settings that illustrate how the sensing and acquisition of new data capturing various aspects of students’ interaction in and with the educational environment can be used to discover previously unknown information.

These workshops and discussions showed educators the different developmental opportunities that are available as our society recover from the changes and challenges brought about by the Corona virus pandemic.

We would also like to recognize the leadership of the Ministry of Education of Abu Dhabi for continuously working to update the educational experience in light with the current circumstances, and prioritizing the safety of students and educational staff.

MY CAMPUS, MY COMMUNITY

PhD Graduates Receive Best Research Recognition from the Federal Authority of Human Resources AWARDED PAPER DEMONSTRATES KEY ROLE OF DATA MINING TO UNCOVER JOB MARKET TRENDS IN THE REGION

Dr. Al Shimmari and Dr. Alibasic’s paper, titled “Analyzing the UAE and GCC Job Market Reliability for a Transition from an Oil/Gas-based Energy Economy toward a Renewable Energy Economy,” aims to provide guidance for decision makers, employers, managers, and firms to utilize a standardized dataset of skills and attributes of different occupations to help them access information related to requirements and needs of emerging job markets. The paper was based on the research project “The Economic Impact of Advanced Technology and Automation on the Oil and Gas Sector”, which was conducted collaboratively with MIT. “This paper’s findings demonstrate the general usefulness

A paper written by two Khalifa University graduates, Dr.Abdulla Al Shimmari, PhD in Interdisciplinary Engineering, and Dr. Armin Alibasic, PhD in Interdisciplinary Engineering, was recognized by the Federal Authority of Human Resources (FAHR) with the H.H. Sheikh Mansour Bin Zayed Award for Best Research in Human Resources – 2019.

The award is given to academic research papers related to human resource capital in the UAE that provide innovative suggestions and initiatives that can be adopted and applied in the country.

and applicability of data mining methods through the utilization of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to uncover job market trends in UAE and GCC energy industries, identifying occupational gaps in terms of supply (syllabuses provided by universities) and demand (jobs available in the market measured through the online job postings),” Dr. Al Shimmari explained.

Although the UAE is setting clear renewable energy-related visions, policies, and regulations to ensure that the country’s transition away from a hydrocarbon-based energy system is smooth, readiness of the UAE’s labor force for the transition is an open question.

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KU Student Receives Prestigious Founding Leader Award

AWARD ESTABLISHED BY MOE TO REWARD THOSE WHO CONTRIBUTE TO THE EDUCATION SECTOR

Khalifa University student Ahmed Alzaabi was one of the recipients of the Founding Leader Award 2019 for the category “Distinguished University Student (BSc).”

“This research contributes toward the enrichment of HR strategy, specifically here in the UAE, through the application of data science methods that enable decisions to be driven from data insights rather than assumptions,” commented Dr. Alibasic.

Both former Khalifa University students are honored to receive such a prestigious award and are proud of what they have achieved.

“It is proof of the high-quality work that is conducted at Khalifa University under the supervision of our valuable professors,” Dr. Alibasic said.

“I would like to acknowledge the incredible efforts and guidance provided by our research team, especially Dr. Mohammed Atif Omar, Department Head of Engineering Systems and Management.

I would also like to acknowledge the great collaboration work which has been done with the research team at MIT,” noted Dr. Al Shimmari.

Dr. Al Shimmari and Dr. Alibasic are continuing their work in data science and machine learning models. They are also working closely with authorities to ensure that the benefits of the research will be applied in the UAE’s human capital development.

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The Award was established by the Ministry of Education to highlight the contributions of those in the education sector by acknowledging and recognizing the valuable achievements and accomplishments of the faculty, staff, and students in the UAE. It aims to continue the legacy of the Founding Leader, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, inspiring everyone to carry on his vision and ideologies to develop and advance further the country, especially the education sector.

Ahmed was a BSc in Petroleum Engineering student and is now pursuing his Master’s degree in Petroleum Engineering at KU. He is currently working at ADNOC Onshore as a Production Engineer.

Ahmed is also a member of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) and a Young Future Energy Leader (YFEL) alumnus.

MY CAMPUS, MY COMMUNITY

Associate Professor Dr. Hwee Lim, Department of English, worked with Ahmed on one of her projects. “I hired Ahmed as a student researcher from 2018-2019. Engineering undergraduates generally lack motivation to be involved in social sciences research. This largely stems from the belief that qualitative social sciences research is less relevant to engineering students than quantitative research in engineering science. Ahmed did not have this misconception but was motivated to be part of my research team because he valued expanding his experience of research in different disciplines,” she commented.

“As Ahmed’s research supervisor, I observed that in his two-year journey as a student researcher, he learned to work as part of a research team and developed valuable work skills such as problemsolving, perseverance in face of obstacles, and collaboration with a research supervisor. He built better communication skills from interacting with the public in data collection and expanded his technical

skills in qualitative research software such as Inqscribe and NVivo 10.

“Ahmed also presented at the 3rd annual AARE Conference 2019 on behalf of the research team and was co-author in two publications from the project. Ahmed’s decision to undertake an MSc degree while working at ADNOC is evidence of his enduring interest in learning and professional development. He is a worthy recipient of The Founding Leader Award – Distinguished University Student category,” Dr. Lim noted.

Commenting on his accomplishment, Ahmed said: “I still cannot believe my hard work and contributions in my university were recognized on a national level. Growing up, I only knew Sheikh Zayed as father or “papa” Zayed. To win an award based on his ideals and inspirations, I still struggle to express how joyful and grateful I am.”

Ahmed is also now working on his MSc thesis that will be titled “Investigation of Wetting Alteration Potential of Surfactants as a Function of Rock Minerology.” The thesis will focus on the surface tension and the extended effect of high pressure and temperatures on surfactants. Surfactants are widely used in the petroleum industry for wettability alteration especially in Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) operations. For the last decade, surfactant EOR has been a subject of active interest due to the commercial availability and its technical benefits. Furthermore, surfactants have the potential to achieve a feasible increased oil recovery in the presence of economic and technological limitations.

Ahmed’s thesis topic is very much in line with one of the areas ADNOC is interested in developing.

Since ADNOC’s vision is to increase oil production, new technologies and their feasibility in ADNOC fields are being explored.

Conducting this study will add to Ahmed’s experience, as well as expand the scope of his expertise beyond his current work.

“The Founding Leader Award is a materialization of my endeavors to excel as a professional engineer and as a young leader who wishes to serve and lead in a dynamic industry.

My goal is to give back to my country by adding value to my professional life as a student and as an engineer.”

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Science of Well-Being Workshops Promotes Student Happiness & Success

The third group of workshops focused on techniques and helped students deal more effectively with stress in their lives by analyzing specific stressors and taking positive actions to minimize their effects.

WORKSHOP DESIGNED TO EASE STRESS AND INCREASE WELL-BEING AMIDST PANDEMIC

The workshops in this category included: • Stress Management • How to Stop Worrying and Start Relaxing The final group of workshops helped students deal with anxiety and depression.

The workshops in this category included: • What is Depression and How to Overcome it?

• Test Anxiety • How to Succeed with Distance Learning • Corona Virus and Crisis Management Skill

The Student Success department successfully delivered a series of workshops to students under the theme “The Science of Well-Being,” which were aimed at helping students approach stressful situations positively and mitigate the adverse effects of Covid-19.

The series of workshops were classified into four distinct, yet interrelated categories.

The first workshop presented practical techniques to increase one’s own happiness, and build more productive habits.

The second group of workshops promoted positive thinking so students can approach unpleasant situations in a more positive and productive way.

The workshops in this category included: • Positive spirit • How to Think Positively Online Workshop • The Happy Me • The keys to Happiness and Positivity in a Crisis • How to Create an Encouraging Distance Learning Environment KU TIMES 34

This workshop series reflects Khalifa University’s commitment to building a diverse community of service-oriented, ambitious and talented individuals through an environment that encourages and nurtures creative inquiry, critical thinking, and human values.

Their efforts are especially needed at this time to tackle the challenges brought about by Covid-19. The stress associated with a high pressure academic environment at a critical developmental period often leads to or reveals problems that are exacerbated due to events such as a pandemic.

The Student Success department endeavors to promote a holistic approach to the psychological health and development of all students. These efforts support students’ educational objectives, as well as enhance the well-being of the KU community.

Student Success accomplishes this by offering a wide variety of services which facilitate students’ personal development, assist in the alleviation, remediation, and prevention of distress, as well as services that educate students in ways that develop self-awareness, selfreliance, and self-confidence.

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KU Elects New Student Council KU’s Student Council Elections were held on Thursday, 1 October 2020, and Noura Alnuaimi, MSc in Cyber Security, was elected as Student Council President.

PRESIDENT Noura Alnsuaimi MSc Cyber Security

VICE PRESIDENT

Venkata Medicharla MSc Mechanical Engineering

Other elected members include: • Vice President: Venkata Medicharla, Msc in Mechanical Engineering • Secretary: Betiel Embaye, BSc in Civil Engineering • Events Chair: Sekout Almarri, BSc in Chemical Engineering • Media & Marketing Chair: Shama AlMazrouei, BSc in Electrical Engineering Congratulations to the new student council members!

EVENT CHAIR

Sekout Al Marri BS Chemical Engineering

SECRETARY

The “Call for Candidates” was sent out

by Student Services in early September, inviting the student body to participate in the Student Council Elections for the academic year 2020-2021.

The annual Student Council Elections took a different form this year. A virtual “Meet the Candidates” assembly was organized on 30 September 2020, which was attended by over 80 students.

Betiel Embaye BS Civil Engineering

MEDIA & MARKETING CHAIR

Shama AL Mazrouei BS Electrical Engineering

During the assembly, those running for Student Council President had the opportunity to introduce themselves and talk about their accomplishments, initiatives, and the reasons why they should be elected. The students interacted and engaged with the candidates to learn more about their platforms and to get to know them better.

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KU Prolific Scientists Awarded Golden Residency Visa THREE MORE KHALIFA UNIVERSITY FACULTY MEMBERS HAVE BEEN AWARDED THE 10-YEAR GOLDEN RESIDENCY VISA BY THE UAE GOVERNMENT.

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Dr. Rashid Abu Al-Rub, Acting Chair of Aerospace Engineering and Professor of Mechanical Engineering; Dr. Mohamed Shawky El Moursi, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; and Dr. Ammar Nayfeh, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, have been recognized for their work and contributions to the UAE. They join nine other Khalifa University faculty who were honored with the golden visa last year.

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Pioneer of 3D Printing in the UAE

Dr. Rashid Abu Al-Rub is the first to work on advancing 3D printing in the Middle East as a technology at the forefront of the fourth industrial revolution. Currently, he is the Director of the Advanced Digital & Additive Manufacturing (ADAM) research center at Khalifa University. ADAM is the first 3D printing center in the Middle East that focuses on education and R&D in the area of additive manufacturing.

Dr. Abu Al-Rub’s work is significantly contributing to the UAE strategic vision in making the country one the world’s 3D printing hubs. His research has accelerated the development of advanced 3D printing materials and technologies that has found many applications in different sectors such as aerospace, defense, automotive, healthcare, water, and energy.

He has developed advanced multi-functional, ultra-lightweight, and ultra-strong 3D printable materials made of plastic, metals, ceramics, and composites called “multifunctional meta-materials” that are digitally designed using elegant mathematics and then 3D printed using plastic, metallic, or ceramic 3D printing technologies. These are very porous lightweight materials with novel properties and functionalities that are driven by the topology of the pores or voids rather than its chemical composition.

These 3D printable materials have demonstrated superior physical (electrical, thermal, chemical, flow) and mechanical (stiffness, strength, damage-resistance) properties that have not been achieved before by other materials. They have been used, for example, in making lightweight sandwich panels for aircrafts, vibration absorbers for spacecrafts, catalytic support structures for the oil and gas industry, thermal management devices such as heat exchangers and heat sinks, membrane spacers for water technologies, three-dimensional energy storage devices, and scaffolder for bone growth and tissue engineering. In collaboration with the University of Manchester and Professor Kin Liao from the Aerospace Engineering Department, these porous materials have been 3D printed using the well-known wonder-material “graphene,” opening the doors for many technological applications.

Dr. Abu Al-Rub’s work on 3D printing caught the imagination of many UAE and international industries. His work has resulted in industry milestones such as 3D printing the first certified Etihad aircraft component and 3D printing desalination membrane spacers that were considered as one of the most disruptive water technology innovations in 2019 according to Lux Research.

Upon receiving the Golden Visa, Dr. Abu Al-Rub said: “I feel truly honored in receiving the UAE Golden Visa from the UAE government recognizing my contribution to the scientific research in the area of additive manufacturing here in UAE and internationally. This would not have been achieved without the significant support of Khalifa University. 3D printing is at the forefront of the fourth industrial revolution, and being recognized for my national and international efforts for advancing the state-of-the-art of 3D printing is a testimony of the serious commitment of the UAE in accelerating the adoption and use of this emerging technology in various sectors here in the UAE and abroad.”

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Champion of Renewable Energy and Smart Grids Dr. Mohamed Shawky El Moursi specializes in renewable energy integration and smart grid development.

He is also the theme lead of Renewable Energy Integration at the Advanced Power and Energy Center (APEC) at Khalifa University.

His professional experience is based on a solid and profound expertise on practical system implementation as evidenced by his work with Siemens in PV systems, R&D technological development with leading wind turbine manufacturer Vestas Wind Systems in Denmark, and transmission system planning and operation with Abu Dhabi Transmission and Dispatch Company (TRANSCO).

In 2012, Dr. El Moursi was a Visiting Professor in the EECS Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has received several international and national prestigious awards such as the UAE Mission Innovation Champion in 2019, Faculty Research Excellence Award in 2018, and Expert and Key Employee award in Denmark. Dr. El Moursi has been also conferred the Faculty Award for Excellence in Collaborative Research (Academic Year 2012-2013) and a medal of recognition from the Abu Dhabi Technology Development Committee for Innovation in 2015, among others. He was also selected to join the Engineering Advisory Board of the Mohammed Bin Rashid Scientists Council (UAE) in December 2018.

In his vast and long experience in the industry, Dr. El Moursi was extensively involved in different industrial projects in North America, Europe, Australia, KU TIMES 38

and the Middle East. These have enriched his profile with a solid track record and contributions in both industrial and academic sectors. His professional expertise has tailored his research interests such that innovative solutions and technologies are proposed and developed to address the practical needs and problems that arise in the industry of renewable energy integration and power grid operation and control. This has resulted in significant international funds for research on electrical power engineering in the UAE. He was able to successfully secure US$7,873,377 worth of internally- and externallyfunded research grants from Europe, North America, GCC countries, and South Korea. These projects resulted in remarkable research outcomes and innovations that have been published in top-quality publications (161 papers), as well as two US patents.

Dr. El Moursi is also an editor for several top-tier IEEE Transactions, a Regional Editor of IET RPG, and appointed as a Guest Editor-in-Chief for a special joint section between IEEE Transactions of Power Systems and IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery. He was elected in 2018 to chair the IEEE PES UAE chapter after serving more than two years as a Vice Chair (2015-2018). Dr. El Moursi has also been a mentor to his students and served as advisor to seven Ph.D. graduates and 22 M.Sc. graduates; many of whom achieved several best thesis and national awards. He has had a great opportunity to empower his students with the required knowledge, skills, and expertise, which enabled them to secure positions in international companies and tier I universities worldwide.

Dr. El Moursi, along with his research team at KU, has designed and developed several in-house experimental

prototypes and tools. He and his team have developed a novel Renewable Energy Management System (REMS) Tool that has been financially supported by Elia Grid International in Belgium, which is currently in operation. At implementing a novel Stability Assessment, Visualization and Enhancement (SAVE) Tool for TRANSCO’s network based on novel AI techniques, data analytics, and deep machine learning. This project is financially supported by TRANSCO and Manitoba Hydro International, Canada.

“I am truly honored and deeply thankful for this valuable recognition of being awarded the 10-year golden residency visa in the UAE. This wouldn’t happen without the great support from the UAE government and Khalifa University since 2011. I also would like to express my sincere thanks to my research team for their outstanding achievements and contributions that resulted in remarkable research outcomes and innovations that have been documented with record of publications in top quality journals and US patents. With Khalifa University’s great support, we have graduated high caliber Ph.D. and M.Sc. students, whereby they received several best thesis and national awards. We have applied the highest standards for developing our research based on welldefined R&D vision and a clear plan for technology development to pave the way for seamless integration of renewable energy systems into smart grids. With this valuable recognition of the 10-year golden residency visa, I’m looking forward to maximizing my efforts and contributions to effectively bridge academia to industry and to advance the UAE R&D agenda to another height of success with global recognition.”

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Nanotechnology Expert

Dr. Ammar Nayfeh’s research in the UAE has focused on the development of new nanomaterials and structures for future semiconductor devices including memory, photovoltaics, photodetectors, and transistors. This includes several activities on the growth, modeling and application of these materials in devices. Dr. Nayfeh was instrumental in helping to establish the first state-of-the-art cleanroom laboratory in the UAE at Khalifa University.

His research has also attracted a significant amount of funding. He has been awarded approximately US$1.2M dollars in external research grants. These grants are from the Office of Naval Research Global, Masdar PV, and Twin Labs. Dr. Nayfeh was also awarded approximately US$3M in internal funding including the Masdar-MIT flagship project on advanced solar and a project on nanomaterials and low temperature germanium growth.

Dr. Nayfeh has authored and co-authored over 100 publications, many of which are in toptier journals including, Nature, IOP Nanotechnology, IEEE Journal of Photovoltaics, Applied Physics Letters, and Elsevier Solar Energy to name a few. He has continued to publish his work in top conferences worldwide including IEEE nano, MRS, ECS, and PVSC. He has also contributed two book chapters and penned a book titled “Nanomaterials-based Charge Trapping Memory Devices” with former PhD student Dr. Nazek El-Atab. In addition to publications, he has filed three patents, including one from his research in the UAE. The patent is for a novel solar cell: “METHOD AND DEVICE FOR LOW COST, HIGH EFFICIENCY STEP PHOTOVOLTAIC CELLS PCT/US2017/056335.

Dr. Nayfeh has also spent time visiting local schools in the UAE to help spark the nextgeneration of scientists in the country as part of the science in residence initiative of the Mohammed bin Rashid Academy of Scientists (MBRAS).

More recently, Dr. Nayfeh has put his work in nanotechnology to good use in the fight against COVID-19. The novel study uses silicon nanoparticles to model how droplets that carry the virus spread, and how this spread impacts the effectiveness of masks.

The study is in collaboration with Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi and will help healthcare professionals better understand how the virus spreads.

“I am deeply honored and thankful for being awarded the 10-year golden residency visa in the UAE. Due to the continued support from the government and Khalifa University in the 10 years since I arrived here, we were able to accomplish a plethora of great achievements, such as setting up the region’s first cleanroom facility and fabricating nanodevices, graduating PhD students, publishing in top-tier journals, writing books, and filing patents in the area of semiconductors, photovoltaics, nanomaterials, and nanodevices. The 10-year golden residency visa system for top scientists highlights the priority the UAE sees in the future of science, technology, research, and higher education. I am extremely humbled to be one of the selected few that are trusted to help reach these goals. I am looking forward to the next 10 years of scientific endeavors and accomplishments and in helping the UAE and Khalifa University rise up the research ranks.”

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2019 KHALIFA UNIVERSITY FACULTY EXCELLENCE AWARD WINNERS

CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL OF THE 2019 KU FACULTY EXCELLENCE AWARD WINNERS.

FACULTY TEACHING EXCELLENCE AWARD

MS. NADIA NWAYHED,

DR. FAISAL AL MARZOOQI,

MS. LUJAIN ALOUM,

Lecturer of Mathematics, College of Arts & Sciences

Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering, College of Engineering

Lecturer of Pharmacology, College of Medicine and Health Sciences

TA TEACHING EXCELLENCE AWARD

MS. AAESHA A. ALMAZROUEI, College of Engineering

KU TIMES 40

LAB STAFF TEACHING EXCELLENCE AWARD

MS. HAIFA BAYER, Lab Technician, College of Arts & Sciences

DR. SHRINIVAS BOJANAMPATI, Lab Engineer, College of Engineering

TA TEACHING EXCELLENCE AWARD

DR. MOHAMMAD ABU HAIJA, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, College of Arts & Sciences

CITATION EXCELLENCE AWARD

DR. DIRAR AL HOMOUZ, Associate Professor of Physics, College of Arts & Sciences

DR. KHALED SALAH, Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, College of Engineering

FACULTY SERVICE EXCELLENCE AWARD 2019 DR. AHMED AL-DURRA,

DR. FAWZI BANAT,

Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, College of Engineering

Professor & Department Chair of Chemical Engineering, College of Engineering

DR. FAHAD ALMARSKARI, Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering, College of Engineering

DR. GEORGIOS KARANIKOLOS, Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, College of Engineering

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INVENTION EXCELLENCE AWARD

TA TEACHING AWARD

DR. AHSAN KHANDOKER, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering

MS. MAHA J. KADADHA, College of Engineering

EXCELLENCE AWARDS 2019 COMMENDATIONS – TEACHING FACULTY TEACHING AWARD

DR. MO’TASSEM AL ARYDAH,

DR. KYRIAKI POLYCHRONOPOULOU,

Assistant Professor of Mathematics, College of Arts & Sciences

Professor of Mechanical Engineering & Director of CeCaS

DR. GEORG PETROIANU, Professor & Chair of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, and Associate Dean for Research, College of Medicine and Health Sciences

LAB STAFF TEACHING AWARD

MR. ALBERT KABANDA, Lab Technician, College of Arts & Sciences

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MR. MOHAMMAD A. SIDDIQI, Lab Instructor, College of Engineering

EXCELLENCE AWARDS 2019 COMMENDATIONS – RESEARCH

FACULTY RESEARCH EXCELLENCE AWARD (PROFESSOR RANK) DR. RASHID ABU AL-RUB, Professor & Acting Chair of Aerospace Engineering, and Director of the ADAM Center

INVENTION EXCELLENCE AWARD

DR. JAMAL M HASSAN,

DR. KYRIAKI POLYCHRONOPOULOU,

Associate Professor of Physics, College of Arts & Sciences

Professor of Mechanical Engineering & Director of CeCaS

FACULTY RESEARCH EXCELLENCE AWARD (ASSISTANT RANK)

DR. SHASHIKANT PANDURANG PATOLE, Assistant Professor of Physics, College of Arts & Sciences

DR. TADAHIRO KISHIDA, Assistant Professor of Civil Infrastructure & Environmental Engineering, College of Engineering

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Khalifa University Class of 2020 PhD Engineering Graduates Prepared to Solve World’s Complex Problems with Unique Engineering Solutions

A total of 17 students from the doctoral program have successfully defended their thesis. Now, a new cadre of talented, highly skilled young professionals, will enter the workforce prepared to lead with integrity and ingenuity – two values deeply embedded in the Khalifa University community and critically needed to overcome the challenging environment caused by Covid-19, as well as other pressing challenges of the 21st century.

The research output of the engineering graduates has resulted in nearly 55 published scientific papers in prestigious journals and conference proceedings, as well as some patents and numerous recognitions.

KU TIMES 44

KHALIFA UNIVERSITY’S CLASS OF 2020 GRADUATES FROM THE PHD IN ENGINEERING PROGRAM ARE READY TO TAKE ON THE WORLD’S MOST PRESSING CLIMATE, HEALTHCARE, WATER AND ENERGY RELATED CHALLENGES.

Dr. Arif Sultan Alhammadi, Executive Vice President of Khalifa University, said: “We are immensely proud of our doctoral students. The high-quality research conducted by our PhD graduates reflects the University’s exceptional doctoral degree program that covers a multitude of disciplines and aims to produce graduates capable of finding innovative engineering solutions to our shared complex problems. They have significantly contributed to the university’s research productivity, as well as our efforts to support Abu Dhabi’s transformation into a knowledge economy focused on innovative sectors. We are confident that they will go on to help build a sustainable future for the UAE, and the world.”

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Through their academic research, the doctoral students addressed many complex challenges directly related to the UAE’s key economic sectors, including renewable energy, water and the environment, health, and robotics.

diagnoses, models that can reduce a building’s energy footprint, search and rescue robots to support on the front lines of major disasters, membranes that can remove saltwater efficiently, and more.

Their scientific advancements and engineering feats are advancing new, high-efficient solar technologies, better ways to improve precision drug delivery and medical

Following are a few of the research highlights from KU’s Spring 2020 PhD Engineering graduates:

Pioneer of 3D Printing in the UAE

that energy to homes and businesses through the electric

Developing highly efficient renewable energy sources to power the world’s growing energy demands sustainably is a key challenge of our time. Many students at Khalifa University, including doctoral student Harry Apostoleris, have taken on this challenge by researching new ways to harness the full spectrum of the sun’s energy for clean electricity.

power grid. The variable nature of renewable energy poses a serious challenge to the power grid. The grid must be flexible enough in order to cope with these variations.

PhD student Baraa Mohandes, under the supervision of Dr. Mohamed Shawky El Moursi, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, explored ways to

Apostoleris researched an underutilized set of solar energy technologies: concentrator photovoltaics (CPV), which involve focusing sunlight onto highly efficient solar cells.

Under the supervision of Dr. Matteo Chiesa, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, the student conducted an in-depth study of the current economic situation of CPVs, assessed their technical limitations, and argued for prioritizing maximal use of the solar resource in the design of new solar energy harvesting systems. He also conducted a number of feasibility studies to determine how to use lightsplitting CPV systems in different applications, including for agricultural photovoltaics, utility- and industrial-scale heat production and water desalination.

improve the power grid’s flexibility, with a focus on

The work bridges the gap between academic engineering research and industrial application, with the ultimate aim of the research to bring the ongoing renewable energy revolution to its next stage. One book, four scientific papers in high-impact journals (including Nature Energy), and five conference papers were produced as a result of this research.

Chemical Engineering, researched how to free hydrogen

demand response programs. He identified shortcomings in existing optimization formulas, created a new smart contract to appeal to the residential sector, and designed a new operation framework for renewable energy sources, which would reduce fast variations on the renewable energy plant side.

Another student investigated how to improve the production of hydrogen, a harmless, zero-emissions fuel source. Habeebllah Oladipo, who was advised by Dr. Giovanni Palmisano, Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, and Dr. Khalid Al Ali, Assistant Professor of from hydrogen sulphide gas – a toxic gas and waste material widely found in the oil and gas industry – by improving the reaction efficiency of a titanium dioxide catalyst. Oladipo developed a model that would predict when a titanium dioxide catalyst would deactivate, and then select the proper operational conditions to avoid this. His work will contribute to the further optimization of

Being able to produce more solar and renewable energy is critical, but just as important is being able to transmit

the photocatalytic production of hydrogen from hydrogen sulphide gas.

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Water and Environment The urgent need for more efficient ways to produce freshwater sustainably is another shared challenge. One way to meet this need is by improving wastewater treatment.

Traditional treatment technologies are inefficient against micro-pollutants and pharmaceuticals, which are hard to remove. Tertiary stage treatment technologies, however, can degrade many of these difficult pollutants. PhD student Ahmed Yusuf, also advised

by Dr. Palmisano, investigated how microfluidic reactors can be improved to degrade difficult pollutants more efficiently in tertiary stage wastewater treatment. His improved designs complement heterogeneous photocatalysis, another effective tertiary stage treatment technology, and contribute important findings to the global efforts to turn wastewater sustainably into a safe source of potable water.

PhD student Elham Ali Abdulkarim also investigated ways to improve wastewater treatment. Under the supervision of Dr. Shadi Hasan, Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, Abdulkarim developed a nano-enhanced membrane to improve a membrane’s ability to filter heavy metals from wastewater. She coated zirconium phosphate nanoparticles, which have exceptional qualities like high ion-exchange abilities and high thermal stability, onto polymer-based membranes. The nano-enhanced membrane proved to remove heavy metals from wastewater more effectively than traditional polymer membranes, findings which could help KU TIMES 46

accelerate the adoption of advanced membranes in wastewater treatment plants locally and abroad.

Another important tool that can be leveraged to produce more freshwater sustainably is rain enhancement. PhD student Haoran Liang investigated how nanotechnology can enhance rainfall via cloud seeding – a weather modification tool recognized for boosting rainfall and in turn, water security.

Throughout the course of his doctoral studies, Liang, under the supervision of Dr. Linda Zou, Professor of Civil Infrastructure and Environmental Engineering, synthesized and tested three different types of novel cloud seeding materials. He explored ways to improve the process of water droplet formation by employing an advanced nanotechnology approach and using environmental-friendly chemicals and synthetic routes.

His research could shed light on the optimal design and fabrication of more efficient cloud seeding materials, which could in turn help the UAE and other countries tackle water insecurity.

In addition to electricity and water, a large portion of the energy mankind uses goes toward keeping our buildings cool. With people spending close to 90% of their lifetime in buildings, indoor conditions can have important implications on people’s comfort, health, and wellbeing. A doctoral thesis aimed at improving a building’s performance holistically was led by PhD student Min Lin, under the supervision of Dr. Elie Azar,

HAORAN LIANG

ADETUNJI ALABI Associate Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

Lin’s research was aimed at evaluating and improving the interaction between people and their built environment in order to optimize energy consumption and comfort. Lin developed a multidisciplinary framework that combined machine learning, human or ‘agent-based’ modeling, data collection, and statistical modeling. The framework successfully illustrates the approach that is needed to address current and future sustainability challenges facing the built environment, supported by case studies and applications in the UAE and abroad.

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Healthcare New solutions aimed at improving medicine and drug delivery will go a long way in advancing human health and longevity, prompting scientists around the world to explore the use of nanotechnology as an effective way to deliver medicine to the body. However, the physical and chemical stability of nanoparticles is poorly understood.

PhD student Nahla Rizk investigated the issue of nanoparticle stability in biomedical applications in her dissertation. Rizk, under the supervision of Dr. Matthew Martin, Assistant Professor of Physics, tested the stability of four different types of gold nanoparticles, each with a different coating nature. Using different chemicals, she replicated common destabilizing environments that can affect nanoparticles to different extents, depending on the nature of the coating material, and decrease the efficiency of different treatments. She developed a novel method for assessing the stability of the nanoparticles, which could help scientists better identify and predict how a given nanoparticle will perform in a certain environment. The new process could help ensure the right nanoparticles are used to deliver lifesaving drugs in the future.

NAHLA RIZK

Another technology gaining traction in the healthcare industry is the ‘lab-on-chip.’ One of the major applications of lab-on-chip devices is their ability to rapidly diagnose infectious diseases. Because they are tiny, low-cost and portable, labon-chip devices are easy to use in the developing world, where fighting infections is most critical.

PhD student Soha Yousuf investigated ways to improve the sensitivity and limit detections of optical sensor devices so they can be even more accurate at making complex diagnoses. This was achieved by designing a low-cost photonic device called a microring resonator that is novel in its suspension design. At a selected wavelength of light, these designed micro-ring resonator bio-sensors could detect the presence of targeted molecules in blood or saliva that could be indicative of a certain illness. Some of these micro-ring resonator designs were also tested to detect very minute variations in gases that could be useful in environmental and medical applications. The designs were also incorporated onto a system-level scale that could be commercialized as a lab-on-a-chip device.

that makes the design of such biosensors easily scalable.

Robotics & Autonomous Systems With climate change accelerating the rate of natural disasters across the world, the need for search and rescue robots capable of navigating unstructured terrain to support rescue missions is needed more than ever.

PhD student Reem S. K. Ashour, under the supervision of Dr. Nawaf AlMoosa, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Director of EBTIC, created a system using AI that assists first responders in mapping and exploring the urban search and rescue environment before they enter it.

Ashour programmed an exploration and mapping system that utilizes deep learning models and sensors, which were deployed on autonomous robots, giving them the ability to locate victims, objects, and risk sources.

The developed system creates a 3D semantic map of the environment, which is a map that contains spatial information and assigns labels to different mapped features. The system also helps the robot choose the next best exploration position.

Under the supervision of Dr. Jaime Viegas, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Yousuf successfully

This advanced mapping capability

designed, developed and tested novel, low-cost micro-ring resonator designs on a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform – a type of platform

in the environment. Ashour’s system

helps the robot effectively identify and locate different types and levels of hazards, as well as any occupants proved to outperform the state-of-theart methods in several performance measures.

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applications were developed without following proper software engineering methodologies, fueling a general lack of trust in these blockchain technologies.

Because blockchain, which is defined as a decentralized distributed database or ledger system, having trust in its records is critical to its successful implementation.

REEM ASHOUR Autonomous systems are also playing increasingly important roles across a range of major industries.

REEM ASHOUR

Information Communication Technology

PhD student Hamda Al Breiki, under the supervision of Dr. Davor Svetinovic, Associate Professor of Electrical

The internet today is based on billions

Engineering and Computer Science,

of computers interconnected by optical

studied the issue of trust in blockchain-

fibers. Light carries the information

Dr. Mohammed Omar, Department

based applications. The UAE National

across the globe in those extremely

Chair and Professor of Industrial

thin fiber wires. A new technological

developed a trust requirement model

and Systems Engineering, developed

revolution is taking place, where

an innovative technique to improve

scientists are creating miniature optical

autonomous nondestructive testing

circuits, that steer light into different

– a way to analyze the properties

paths depending on their content. This

of a material, component or

will push for much larger bandwidths

system without causing damage.

available for 5G networks and beyond.

PhD student Yusra Abdulrahman, under the supervision of

The UAE National developed a

for blockchain applications, along with a trust requirement engineering methodology. Her findings revealed the importance of incorporating trust right at the beginning of a software development process in the future development of blockchain applications. This research work produced significant contributions

technique, which combines infrared

PhD student Salim Alkaabi, under

thermography, principal component

the supervision of Dr. Jaime Viegas,

analysis and artificial neural

investigated how light and matter

networks, to improve autonomous

interact in silicon, which is the building

defect detection in low conductive

material to all electronic chips we use

materials with little to no human

today, towards developing micrometer

Conclusion

intervention. The study could

devices that can encode information on

With these projects and others being

help advance the manufacturing

light streams travelling on tiny wires,

carried out by Khalifa University’s

sector in the UAE by contributing

a thousand times smaller than the

engineering PhD students, KU is

insight into the latest innovative

diameter of an average human hair.

accelerating the technological and

technologies and inspection methods on the market, while improving the productivity and the quality of UAE’s industries. By applying this technology, the UAE would achieve sustainable manufacturing growth and strengthen the nation’s global competitiveness.

KU TIMES 48

in the area of blockchain-oriented software engineering which can be further explored and developed.

industrial innovations required to achieve Blockchain is another computing

the UAE’s strategic goals and knowledge

innovation that has the potential to

economy transformation. Importantly,

transform the way we bank, interact

they are nurturing the next generation of

online, and keep our data secure.

engineers who will positively contribute

Unfortunately, though, the full range of

to the new policies and innovative

blockchain applications are not being

solutions needed to overcome the most

realized many newly created blockchain

pressing challenges of the 21st century.

MY CAMPUS, MY COMMUNITY

Khalifa University Wins the ASQ EMEA Students Competition 2020 A paper by senior undergraduate students from the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department at Khalifa University has won first place in the American Society for Quality (ASQ) Europe, Middle East, And Africa Region (EMEA) Students Competition 2020!

The ASQ EMEA Students Competition highlights the region’s undergraduate and graduate students’ efforts and contribution to improve local service quality, which in return improves quality of life for all.

A total of five teams made it to the final rounds. The KU team was represented by Maha Al Dhaheri, Mariam Ramadan, Afra Al Mheiri, and Maryam Al Shehhi, and was supervised by Dr. Mecit Can Emre Simsekler, Assistant Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and Dr. Saed Amer, Assistant Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

contributions to improve local service quality. The final round of Jury presentations of the ASQ EMEA student competition

Their paper, titled “Reducing Patient Discharge Time using

took place virtually on Thursday, 15 October 2020. Finalist

Applied Statistical Techniques,” summarized their senior

teams showcased well-planned and executed projects in

design project, which leveraged quality tools and methods

different fields, including healthcare, education, transport and

to improve the patient discharge process for an inpatient

utilities among others.

clinic of a local hospital in Abu Dhabi.

The ASQ is a global organization with members in more than “We leveraged each team member’s unique and diverse

130 countries. The ASQ brings together the people, ideas

strengths, knowledge and skills to develop our project,”

and tools that make the world work better. The ASQ EMEA

explained team member Mariam Ramadan. “Winning this

Region Center represents the Europe, Middle East and Africa

competition has blessed us with an opportunity to raise

to empower people, communities, and organizations of the

Khalifa University’s name on an international level. We

region to achieve excellence through quality.

were also able to showcase the ISYE department’s talents and capabilities. This achievement fueled us to keep moving

On the importance of participating in international

forward and achieve more. Moreover, witnessing our

competitions like this one, Mariam said: “The competition was

diligence and hard work’s recognition on a global scale is

a great experience. We had the privilege of sharing our project

truly rewarding and heart-warming.”

with people from different countries and acquiring different expertise. The competition opened our eyes to the importance

The competition is meant to highlight the region’s

of quality in a wide range of sectors. It taught us to believe in

undergraduate and graduate students’ efforts and

our ourselves and our work’s worth.”

49 KU TIMES

LIBRARY CORNER

Open Access Publishing

with OA free access is available to all readers, without restrictions based on ability to pay or location. The cost for publication is shifted from the reader to the author (though some publications are funded via third-party societies or foundations). Information is therefore more widely available.

Over the last two decades, Open Access has rapidly transformed the academic publishing landscape.

Background The movement that became Open Access developed and grew as the Internet made cheap and easy access to digital information possible. This was a massive change from a print-only world, where sharing information required extensive costs of printing physical journals, purchasing subscriptions, or photocopying and mailing articles. Before the term “Open Access” even existed, in the early 1990s, as access to the Internet spread in academia, FTP servers were set up to share digital resources freely (if not always legally). At the same time, the first journals were set up that distributed their content for free, usually via email or Usenet newsgroups.

Introduction Open Access (OA) publishing removes the price and access barriers to academic literature. The traditional publication model, which developed in a pre-Internet, print-only environment, required readers or their institutions to pay subscription fees to access scholarly publications. This model gave exclusive control to academic publishers, who were incentivized to maximize the cost of materials, which further limited the reach and impact of the published work.

The Open Access model, which is related to other Internetbased democratizing movements (like Open Source and anti-copyright movements) has been a revolution in the academic publishing world. Unlike the traditional model, KU TIMES 50

Simultaneously, what is now called the “serials crisis” was being recognized as an existential threat to academic publishing. For several decades, the cost of subscription fees for academic journals had been growing faster than the rate of inflation. At the same time, library budgets were remaining static or declining in real terms. This unsustainable condition was both causing universities to cancel subscriptions to meet budgetary requirements and encouraged a search for other options. Many came to see OA as the solution to this crisis.

In this century, as publishing and subscription costs have continued to increase, Open Access publishing has grown faster than traditional models. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) launched in 2003 with an index of 300 journals. As of November 2020, the database now includes more than 15,500 journals. More than half of the academic output of some fields, such as mathematics and biomedical

RESEARCH CENTER UPDATES

research, is published in some type of OA format, though other fields, such as chemistry and engineering have not adopted OA as quickly. Some academic organizations have urged their members to use OA whenever possible, starting with the International Mathematical Union, which adopted this stance in 2001.

Using OA does not negatively affect the reach or impact of academic work. Indeed, Open Access articles are, in general, both viewed online and downloaded more often than closed access articles. Also, multiple studies show that OA journals are cited more often than subscriptionbased articles, which increases the visibility and reach of authors and institutions.

This citation gap seems to grow larger the longer that an article has been published. The gap is largest in Hybrid journals (which contain a mix of OA and paid articles).

Closed articles are cited less often than OA articles in the same issue of journals. Also, OA articles seem to be referenced more often on social media and internet sites such as Wikipedia. Open Access journals are rated and evaluated for impact factor and other metrics the same as traditional journals, so authors can find high quality journals to publish their work in. And because the author retains the copyright, the text of OA articles can more often be included in institutional repositories, which further increases its visibility.

The cost of the APCs can run to a few thousand US dollars for each article, which can be a considerable burden for authors who might want to publish their work via OA. The university administration established the guideline that the APC for articles that are accepted for publication in journals that are rated as Q1 by all three of the major rating organizations (Scimago, Scopus, and Web of Science/Clarivate) will be paid by the university.

The library was given the responsibility to supervise these payments and to give authors the training and support that they would need as they navigate the system. To accomplish this, a KU Open Access website was set up at https://library.ku.ac. ae/oa. This site has lists of all the Q1 OA journals for each of these current publishers, as well as links to all the tools each publisher provides to assist authors (such as finding the right journal for them, making sure their articles are formatted properly). The site also has recordings of training sessions that have been given for authors on how to submit their manuscripts for publication and how to request payment of the APC. Despite some delays in implementation due to the pandemic, the results of this first year have been very favorable, as can be seen in the chart below:

Status at KU Within this environment, and with the motivation to improve the quality and reach of the academic output of KU authors, KU’s Provost launched an initiative in late 2019 to promote and support publishing in Open Access journals.

The library was directed to identify the most used and highest quality publishers and negotiate agreements with them. A study was conducted and found that the best candidates for an initial program were IEEE, Elsevier, ACS, and Wiley. Elsevier is not yet willing to establish OA agreements with universities in the region, so it was dropped. Agreements were struck with the other three publishers instead, allowing KU to pay the Article Publication Charges (APC) for KU authors in these publications.

While the OA project is limited to only these three publishers for this year, qwe hope that the list of approved publishers will expand into areas which are not well covered by these three publishers in the future.

Anyone interested in more information about Open Access can learn more on the OA website, or can contact the librarians at the library portal: https://library.ku.ac.ae/.

51 KU TIMES

FROM THE NEWSROOM

Khalifa University Tops in UAE in Two International Rankings

Highlights of the latest important announcements, strategic initiatives, new partnerships, and VIP visits

Khalifa University has been ranked 15th in the 2021 QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) Top 50 Under 50 rankings. Khalifa University is also ahead of any other institution in the Arab world to achieve this remarkable distinction in the QS ranking.

The QS Top 50 Under 50 listing highlights the world’s top 50 universities established within the last 50 years, based on the most recent edition of the QS World University Rankings. The exclusive QS table for the world’s younger academic institutions aims to recognize a university’s reputation, resources, and world-class outcomes that are typically built over time.

Dr. Arif Sultan Al Hammadi, Executive Vice-President, Khalifa University of Science and Technology, said: “Another honor has come our way as Khalifa University has become the only institution to stay ahead of other universities in the Arab world with this distinction in the QS Top 50 Under 50 rankings.

We are ranked 15th among the top universities in the world, which reflects our steady progress and the sincere efforts of our faculty, staff and students, especially in the research and academic arena. We believe our global recognitions and achievements are in line with our mission to be at the forefront in contributing to the UAE’s knowledge economy drive.”

Only recently, Khalifa University was ranked 211 in the QS World University Rankings 2021, a massive jump of 57 notches, reiterating the university’s increasingly impactful status as a research-based institution, leading in the creation of knowledge and human capital.

Khalifa University is already ranked top in the UAE and 114th globally in ‘Engineering’ subject in the US News & World Report’s, 2020 Best Global Universities rankings that was published in November 2019. The university is also ranked second in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and among the top 200 globally in the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings 2020 by Subject: Engineering and Technology.

KU TIMES 52

FROM THE NEWSROOM

Khalifa University, In Collaboration With Aviation Industry Leaders, Launches Webinar Series on Sustainable Aviation Fuels FIRST SEMINAR ON 5 AUGUST TITLED ‘THE CHALLENGE FOR SUSTAINABLE AVIATION FUELS BEYOND COVID-19’ TO COVER KEY SUBJECTS

Khalifa University, in collaboration with key aviation industry players Etihad Airways, the General Civil Aviation Authority, The Boeing Company, and the International Air Transport Association (IATA), announced the launch of a webinar series to emphasize the need for establishing the Sustainable Aviation Fuels Initiative (SAFI) in the UAE. The SAFI–UAE Webinar Series will include several virtual panel sessions that will take place over a period of 8–10 weeks. The series is supported by nearly 50 local and international government, corporate and academic stakeholders. Out of the eight seminars, the first was held on 5 August and was co-hosted by the International Association for Energy Economics.

The first seminar titled ‘The Challenge for Sustainable Aviation Fuels Beyond COVID-19’l addressed the extreme challenges being faced by the aviation industry as a whole due to the current pandemic, and talked specifically about how Sustainable Aviation Fuels can move forward.. The 60-minute

event was a panel session moderated

by Dr. Steve Griffiths, Senior VicePresident, Research and Development, and Professor of Practice, Khalifa University.

development and use of sustainable aviation fuels to date, and the onset of the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA).

Dr. Steve Griffiths said: “We are delighted to launch this SAFI – UAE Webinar Series at the most challenging time not only for the aviation industry but also for related sectors and policymakers across the globe. The first seminar will set the tone for the series and will offer a general overview of the need for SAF and the goals that the aviation industry has set for itself.

We believe this initiative will throw a spotlight on the need for setting up the Sustainable Aviation Fuels Initiative (SAFI) in the UAE.”

They also focused on the outlook towards the long-term goal of reducing carbon emissions by 50% in 2050 using 2005 as the baseline year, and the future for SAF and the pathways most likely to address the challenge.

The panelists for the first seminar include Robert Boyd, Assistant Director–Aviation Environment, International Air Transport Association (IATA), Switzerland, Jim Hileman, Chief Scientific and Technical Advisor for Environment, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), US, and Dr. Alejandro Rios-Galvan, Director, SBRC, Khalifa University.

Panelists shared their insights and perspectives on the short and long-term impacts of the COVID-19 demand shock for the aviation industry, the efforts and strategies of the aviation industry to reduce its carbon footprint, the

The second seminar titled ‘Pathways to produce SAF’ was held on 11 August and has a panel session moderated by Dr. Alejandro RiosGalvan. Panelists include Mark Rumizen, Senior Technical Specialist, Aviation Fuels, FAA, US, Bruno Miller, Managing Director – Fuels, Fulcrum Bioenergy, US, and Jennifer Holmgren, Chief Executive Officer, Lanzatech, US. Panelists in this session shared their insights on an understanding of the fuel approval process for SAF, the annexes that have been approved up to date and the ones that are on the pipeline, assess some of the most relevant projects that are being developed worldwide, the current and future technologies that can be used for producing SAF, and the challenges for developing refining infrastructure for SAF and getting it to market.

53 KU TIMES

FROM THE NEWSROOM

Khalifa University, UAE Space Agency and YahSat in 3-Way Funding Agreement to Establish ‘Khalifa University Space Technology and Innovation Center’ KUSTIC WILL INCORPORATE EXISTING YAHSAT SPACE LAB AND FOCUS ON TRAINING STUDENTS IN SATELLITE DESIGN AND MANUFACTURING

The main objectives of KUSTIC will be to build capabilities and create a technical space hub through training UAE students in satellite design and manufacturing, conducting scientific research in space sector and applications, developing satellite manufacturing capabilities in the UAE, promoting and inspiring entrepreneurship in the space sector, supporting space science and technology initiatives of the UAE Space Agency, and focus on the design and assembly/integration/testing of small satellites through the Yahsat Space Lab. KUSTIC will aim to achieve the UAE’s vision in space exploration, technologies, and applications. It will play a crucial role in building capabilities and creating a technical hub by training UAE students in satellite design and manufacturing, conducting scientific research in the space sector and applications, and developing satellite manufacturing capabilities in the UAE. It will also promote and inspire entrepreneurship in the space sector; while supporting space science and technology initiatives of the UAE Space Agency.

The Center will incorporate the existing YahSat Space Lab (YSL), which was established in 2017 as the nationwide focal point in the design and Assembly/Integration/Testing (AIT) of CubeSats, both in terms of facilities and of expertise. All small satellite design, AIT and manufacturing activities of the Centre shall be performed at YSL. The lab produced and successfully launched the UAE’s first imaging CubeSat in 2018.

Khalifa University, the UAE Space Agency (UAESA), and Al Yah Satellite Communications (YahSat), have signed a three-way funding agreement to establish and operate the Khalifa University Space Technology and Innovation Center (KUSTIC), firmly committing to scientific innovations and laying the foundations for further inspiring the UAE’s future space missions.

A virtual gathering in Abu Dhabi on the agreement was attended by His Excellency Dr. Ahmed Belhoul Al Falasi, Minister of State for Entrepreneurship and SMEs – Chairman of UAE Space Agency, His Excellency Dr. Eng. Mohammed Nasser Al-Ahbabi, Director-General of the UAE Space Agency, Dr Arif Sultan Al Hammadi, Executive Vice-President, Khalifa University, His Excellency Khaled Al Qubaisi, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Al Yah Satellite Communications Company (YahSat), and His Excellency Masoud Sharif, CEO of YahSat. KU TIMES 54

His Excellency Dr. Ahmed bin Abdullah Hamid Belhoul Al Falasi, Minister of State for Higher Education and Advanced Skills, and Chairman, UAE Space Agency, said: “We are looking forward to achieving a fruitful collaboration with Khalifa University of Science and Technology and YahSat that aims to enhance the interest of the youth in technology and innovation, and getting engaged in all areas of science, technology, engineering and math. Earlier this year, we launched a national strategy for the space sector that will help our country gain insights matching the level of advanced countries in this vital sector. Our wise leadership has spared no effort in developing scientific research facilities in the UAE, and providing young nationals with training and professional qualifications, as they are the key drivers to move forward towards achieving the government’s vision in this field.”

His Excellency Dr. Eng. Mohammed Nasser Al-Ahbabi, Director General of the Emirates Space Agency, said: “The achievements gained by the national space sector is the translation of the government’s wise and long-term vision for developing the space sector, which further enhances the plans and agendas in support of the sector.

FROM THE NEWSROOM

DR. PRASHANTH MARPU

DR. ELENA FANTINO

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING AND COMPUTER SCIENCE

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF AEROSPACE ENGINEERING

We are consistently working towards strengthening productive partnerships with different organizations, adding value to the sector. Our collaboration with Khalifa University of Science and Technology and YahSat will help in supporting the young Emiratis’ ambitions in working and being productive individuals in the space sector, thus enhancing the UAE’s leading status in the region and the world.”

Al Ahbabi added: “We believe that all outcomes of this collaboration will have a significant role in consolidating the entrepreneurial spirit among the youth and increasing the number of trained staff in the space sector.”

Dr Arif Sultan Al Hammadi said: “As the UAE marches ahead with its ambitious plans for space missions, keeping pace with the technology advancements in this special industry has become not only essential for every institution in the country, but prudent as well. Top-ranked Khalifa University continues to remain the perfect training ground for students in science and technology, providing the right infrastructure for future scientists to seek new worlds and reach beyond today’s frontier. We believe this partnership with UAE Space Agency and YahSat will further solidify our status as not only a research-intensive institution working in space-related technologies but also the ideal university that seeks to build human capital in the most advanced areas for tomorrow’s scientific development.”

His Excellency Khaled Al Qubaisi said: “As one of the trusted satellite operators in the world today, Yahsat embodies our nation’s dreams of becoming a leading technology innovation hub. We are committed to using our capabilities and standing as an industry leader to nurture the prospects of our youth

and their potential on a global scale. By guiding scores of aspiring engineers at Yahsat Space Lab, we have discovered an enormous pool of talent within the UAE, and would like to develop it further. Yahsat’s responsibilities as a technology mentor have increased manifold with the inception of the new Space Technology and Innovation Centre. We will continue to extend our expertise and support the students through internships, career placements and research opportunities.”

According to the agreement, KUSTIC will specifically empower the development of various research thrusts covering major aspects of space mission development. The projects and initiatives will benefit the UAE and contribute to key sectors of the national economy.

More importantly, KUSTIC will be an important partner in raising awareness about the space sector among the Emirati youth, and the importance of their role in the advancement of national research and development. Moreover, in addition focusing on the design and Assembly/Integration/Testing (AIT) of small satellites, the Center will aim to establish component, assemblies and subsystem manufacturing capabilities.

Two already existing Khalifa University research centers will contribute to KUSTIC’s activities. The ‘space robotics’ research thrust shall be covered under the leadership of the research staff from the KU Centre for Autonomous Robotic Systems (KUCARS) while the ‘space power’ and ‘energy storage’ research thrust shall be covered under the leadership of KU Advanced Power and Energy Center (APEC), another existing research center.

55 KU TIMES

FROM THE NEWSROOM

Khalifa University and Ministry of Education to Commence National Ambassadors Program ‘Estedad’

LED BY KHALIFA UNIVERSITY EXPERTS, TRACKS ON ‘ENRICHMENT’, ‘INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP’ AND ‘SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH’ TO HAVE 25 STUDENTS EACH

Khalifa University, in collaboration with the UAE Ministry of Education, announced on 19 August the beginning of three tracks under the National Ambassadors Program ‘Estedad’, which aims to enrich the capabilities of students in high school and prepare them to excel academically, gain more insights in entrepreneurship and scientific research.

Khalifa University will be offering the three tracks – enrichment, innovation and entrepreneurship, and scientific research. Each of the tracks lasts for two-weeks and is led by a Khalifa University expert. Each track has 25 students from Grade 11 and 12, of which 20 are UAE nationals.

Students were selected on the basis of their academic and behavioral performance in the school’s transcript and their score in National Ambassador Program entry assessments.

KU TIMES 56

FROM THE NEWSROOM

Apart from the requirements from the UAE Ministry of Education, Khalifa University assessed their capabilities and potential through an interview and selection process.

Khalifa University organized an orientation session for the ‘Enrichment’ track students recently that included a general overview of the university and its academic programs, in addition to an introduction to the track.

Dr. Amna AlDahak AlShamsi, Acting Assistant Undersecretary, Activities Sector, expressed her appreciation for this solid collaboration between the Ministry of Education and Khalifa University which became a nationally remarkable scientific symbol full of a diverse range of specialized experiences in many critical areas. The Ministry of Education seeks to leverage the university’s resources to empower students through a collaboration that can achieve the goals of the two sides and their future ambitions represented in creating a new generation who is able to rise and compete in different fields including Science and Technology, Innovation, Scientific Research and Entrepreneurship.

HE also added that the engagement of the students into these tracks, which is led by Khalifa University, is an ideal opportunity to develop their knowledge and skills in those tracks as well as introducing them to the nature of university life and the most important skills a student should own during his/her academic journey.

Dr. Ahmed Al Shoaibi, Senior Vice-President, Academic and Student Services, Khalifa University, said: “We are happy to collaborate with the Ministry of Education on the Estedad capacity building initiative and contribute to developing talents and skills in key areas of importance for high school students. Our academic and research infrastructure provide the right learning ground for these students who can develop themselves in enrichment, innovation and entrepreneurship, and research tracks during this summer. We believe this summer program will prove beneficial to them as they seek higher academic and professional excellence for their future career.”

Led by Dr. Hassan Barada, Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies, College of Engineering, and Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Khalifa

University, the ‘Enrichment’ track will focus on ‘design thinking’. It will seek to promote the students’ knowledge and skills in different aspects, train them on scientific areas including artificial intelligence (AI), programming, and robotics. It will also introduce them to design thinking, research methodologies, creativity and innovation while equipping them with the skills needed to apply for the university after school years.

Participants will be enriched by the Khalifa University College of Engineering, which is ranked among the top 200 worldwide.

Dr. Nawaf I. Almoosa, Acting Director of Emirates ICT Innovation Centre (EBTIC), and Assistant Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Khalifa University, will lead the ‘Innovation and Entrepreneurship’ track and help nurture students in the business field, embedding them with the traits and skills of an entrepreneur, and empowering them to think out-of-the-box innovative solutions. Students will gain important entrepreneurial skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, communication, risk-taking and collaboration. In line with the UAE’s vision, Khalifa University focuses on technology-based start-ups that contribute to the knowledge-based economy.

The ‘Research’ track led by Dr. Sami Bashir, Director, Technology Management and Innovation, Khalifa University, will provide students with the scientific research methodology concepts, protecting IP rights and filing patents. This will help students understand the importance of incorporating innovation skills in conducting cutting-edge scientific research and the ability to identify and contextualize problems, validate technological solutions, collect/analyze research findings, configure and present research data into meaningful perspective. Khalifa University has the highest number of patents and IPs in the UAE – with 167 issued patents, 228 patent applications pending, and 417 invention disclosures.

The Estedad National Ambassadors Program, launched by the Ministry of Education and 18 academic and related stakeholders in the UAE, is a prerequisite for the International Ambassadors Programs that the Ministry of Education has been implementing annually since 2016.

57 KU TIMES

FROM THE NEWSROOM

Khalifa University Launches 4+1 Accelerated Bachelors and Masters Programs, Encouraging Students at All Levels to Go for Higher Studies

PROGRAM AIMS AT REDUCING STUDY DURATION FOR DISTINGUISHED STUDENTS AND OBTAINING BSC CREDIT HOURS AT HIGH SCHOOL LEVEL AS WELL AS MASTER’S CREDITS DURING BACHELOR’S COURSE

Khalifa University has launched an accelerated educational program that reflects the University’s efforts towards accelerating, integrating and aligning different educational levels, by allowing outstanding high school students to take Bachelor-level courses for credit, and brilliant Bachelor’s students to take Master’s level courses for credit. This is expected to bridge the gap between educational levels, providing an opportunity for exceptional students to obtain their degrees within a shorter duration.

KU TIMES 58

FROM THE NEWSROOM

Khalifa University collaborated with

students to take Master’s level courses

A student can register for up

the Ministry of Education to select elite

for credit. This is expected to bridge

to six credits of Master’s level

students from grades 11 and 12 to join

the gap between educational levels,

courses that can be used towards

this dual-credit program where they will

providing an opportunity for exceptional

the elective courses during the

be able to take one course per semester

students to obtain their degrees in a

undergraduate program. A Master’s-

within the 2020-2021 academic year.

shorter duration.

level course taken during the senior

For the Fall semester, 18 exceptional

year of undergraduate studies will

students were selected after excelling

Dr. Arif Sultan Al Hammadi, Executive

count towards the accelerated

in rigorous entrance tests and personal

Vice-President, Khalifa University,

Master’s program courses

interviews. The students were given a

said: “The accelerated Master’s

requirement, provided the student

selection of five courses to choose from

program at Khalifa University enables

achieves a minimum of B-grade in

including calculus, physics as well as

excellent students to jump-start

that course.

introduction to programming (C++ or

graduate education with significant

Matlab). More high school students are

advantages such as saving on time

Through its three colleges – the

expected to join in the Spring semester

and and efforts. Through this program,

College of Engineering, College of

in addition to this first cohort.

Khalifa University facilitates students

Arts and Sciences, and the College

right from the high-school and

of Medicine and Health Sciences –

On the other hand, the 4+1 Accelerated

undergraduate levels, to continue

Khalifa University currently offers

Master of Science Programs enable

learning right up to their Master’s,

16 bachelors and 17 Master’s

exceptional senior undergraduate

either to be eligible to join a workplace

degree programs, in addition

students in the College of Engineering

or continue their journey towards a

to three doctoral degree (PhD)

to start their Master’s studies even

PhD. We welcome the 18 newly enrolled

programs with 12 Concentrations.

while pursuing their undergraduate

dual-credit students and believe

education. Through the Accelerated

this program will encourage eligible

Khalifa University has three

MSc program option, a highly

students enthusiastic about pursuing

research institutes – Masdar

motivated student, with the help of

their advanced degrees by offering

Institute, Petroleum Institute,

her/his academic advisor, can finish

them a fast-track option.”

and the Robotics and Intelligent

undergraduate and Master’s degrees

Systems Institute, in addition to 20

within a nominal period of five years.

In order to be eligible for the

core research centers exploring

The accelerated program targets

Accelerated MSc program, a student

sectors ranging from smart systems

students for whom a Master’s degree

must have a minimum cumulative

and robotics to clean energy,

will provide the necessary preparation

Grade Point Average (CGPA) of 3.5 out

hydrocarbons and aerospace,

to achieve career goals, or for pursuing

of 4 with a minimum of 90 credits of

as well as challenges of critical

a doctorate degree.

undergraduate study. A conditional

importance to the UAE’s knowledge

admission may be granted, if an

economy transformation. The

In parallel, the accelerated program

application is made during the student’s

University has a strong IP portfolio

also reflects Khalifa University’s efforts

junior year of undergraduate study.

– a total of over 140 issued patents

towards accelerating, integrating and

However, the student must meet all

– the highest among universities

aligning different educational levels,

the Master’s admission requirements,

in the UAE, as well as around 360

by allowing outstanding high school

including finishing the Bachelor’s

filed patent applications, resulting

students to take Bachelor-level courses

degree, before being granted full

from more than 400 invention

for credit, and brilliant Bachelor’s

admissions to the program.

disclosures.

59 KU TIMES

FROM THE NEWSROOM

Lockheed Martin and Khalifa University to Collaborate on Research, Academic Programs AGREEMENT WILL HELP INCREASE PIPELINE OF HIGHLY SKILLED AEROSPACE, DEFENSE, TECHNOLOGY AND SECURITY ENGINEERS IN THE REGION

Lockheed Martin, a U.S.-based global aerospace, security and technology leader, and Khalifa University signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to collaborate on research and academic initiatives that will advance technology and human capital development in the United Arab Emirates.

Dr. Steven H. Walker, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Lockheed Martin, and Dr. Arif Sultan Al Hammadi, Executive Vice-President, Khalifa University, signed the agreement virtually, which identifies areas of mutual interest in support of Lockheed Martin’s research endeavors and the development of a knowledge-based economy as outlined by UAE Vision 2021. It is the first of several planned formal agreements between Lockheed Martin and Khalifa University to increase the pipeline of highly skilled aerospace, defense, technology, and security engineers in the region.

“At Lockheed Martin, we are committed to working together with colleges and universities to advance the strategic priorities of our customers,” said Dr. Walker, who recently joined the Khalifa University Board of Trustees, succeeding Lockheed Martin’s Executive Chairman Marillyn A. Hewson.

“As a well-respected research institution and a leading contributor to the UAE’s vision to shape a knowledge-based economy, Khalifa University is an obvious partner. We are confident that our collaboration will help advance STEM careers, evolve the country’s research ecosystem and provide unique opportunities for research and development activities.”

Under the agreement, Lockheed Martin and Khalifa University will explore opportunities for cooperation, led by the university’s faculty, in areas including machine intelligence, autonomy, microelectronics, structural and thermal materials, and air vehicle research. The publication of research, along with development and assessment of academic course material, will also add to knowledge sharing through the MOU. KU TIMES 60

Dr. Al Hammadi said: “As a research-intensive educational institution that seeks to produce world leaders and critical thinkers in applied science and engineering, we are delighted to partner with Lockheed Martin to focus more on advanced research areas. The MoU with a globally leading aerospace and advanced technologies company will not only help develop talent locally through STEM collaborations, but also offer us access to Lockheed Martin’s technological capabilities. We believe equipping the youth in the UAE and building new capacities in areas including aerospace will benefit the country, contributing to catalyzing the growth of the rapidly developing knowledge-economy of Abu Dhabi and the UAE.” Lockheed Martin works with leading universities worldwide to sponsor research and perform collaborative research for government customers. The company’s Center for Innovation and Security Solutions (CISS), based in Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, has hosted merit-based summer internship programs for topperforming UAE engineering students every year since 2017.

This summer, 16 talented students from leading institutions, including Khalifa University, are interning virtually at the CISS to comply with distance learning measures aimed at containing the spread of COVID-19.

With 19 research centers focusing on various economic sectors that are considered strategic to the UAE, Khalifa University drives innovation and scientific exploration in advanced technology areas such as aerospace, nuclear engineering, advanced materials, oil and gas, and clean energy. Each year, the University adds a sizable number of patents to the intellectual property (IP) basket of the UAE. At present, Khalifa University has 126 issued patents, with 343 patent applications pending, and more than 400 invention disclosures.

FROM THE NEWSROOM

Two Khalifa University Proposals Awarded in Mubadala-SRC’s Intelligent Systems Hardware Research Program PROJECTS TO FOCUS ON ENERGY-EFFICIENCY AND HIGHSPEED COMMUNICATIONS BETWEEN AI DEVICES

US-based Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), Mubadala Investment Company, and GLOBALFOUNDRIES® (GF®) announced that two proposals from Khalifa University have been awarded as part of the SRC Global Research Collaboration intelligent systems Hardware (AIHW) research program.

The two projects are ‘Alternative Numbering Systems and Architectures for AI Edge Devices’ by Dr. Thanos Stouraitis, Professor, and Chair, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and ‘Silicon Photonics intelligent systems Accelerators for Data Center Integration’ by Dr. Jaime Viegas, Associate Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The announcements were made during a virtual kick-off event that gathered representatives of all stakeholders from the government, academic, and industry sectors.

Dr. Arif Sultan Al Hammadi, Executive Vice-President, Khalifa University of Science and Technology, said: “The two winning proposals from Khalifa University on intelligent systems hardware strongly suggest our commitment to develop high technology areas that are relevant to Abu Dhabi and the UAE. Our researchers are driving innovation in semiconductors for

AI, while equipping our students with technology expertise. We believe the winning research proposals will help establish the status of Khalifa University as a leader in AI hardware and bring multiple long-term benefits to Abu Dhabi and the UAE.” Dr. Todd Younkin, newly named CEO of SRC said: “We are excited to select Khalifa University for inclusion in SRC’s AI Hardware program as the research will result in innovations for the UAE and beyond. We applaud UAE’s emphasis on AI as a foundational technology and support their Minister of intelligent systems as he shapes the AI landscape.”

“The proliferation of AI in the cloud and at the edge of the network is driving the next digital transformation that will reshape our world in profound ways,” said Ted Letavic, CTO of Computing and Wired Infrastructure at GF. “Through critical research, in partnership with Khalifa University, GLOBALFOUNDRIES is advancing next generation compute architectures through hardware differentiation to support the compute workloads required for future AI solutions.”

Dr. Stouraitis’ project aims at achieving energyefficient hardware for implementing AI on edge devices. The research will train graduate students in the fields of AI, application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) design and testing. Dr. Viegas’ project proposes to develop an integrated silicon photonics platform for high speed interconnect between AI chips, as well as to develop components that can be used for photonic compute architectures.

Fabrication support for the two research projects will be provided by GLOBALFOUNDRIES, which is an SRC member company and partner in this AI Hardware program.

Semiconductor Research Corp. (SRC) Global Research Collaboration (GRC) had invited the white papers under the AIHW research program. The program’s goal is to create new highly efficient AI platforms, enabling neuro-inspired, cognitive and learning abilities which will address the vast range of future data types and workloads as intelligence is enabled from edge devices to the cloud.

61 KU TIMES

FROM THE NEWSROOM

Khalifa University Summer Challenge 2020 Winners Blend Engineering and Humanitarian Perspectives to Develop ‘eDoctor’ App

KU TIMES 62

WITH THEIR ‘GLOBAL-LOCAL’ APPROACH, GRADE 11-12 STUDENTS DISPLAY INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGICAL SKILLS TO DEVELOP APP FOR SMARTPHONES AND DESKTOPS

FROM THE NEWSROOM

Khalifa University has announced that the winners of its Summer Challenge 2020 have skillfully combined both engineering and humanitarian perspectives to design ‘eDoctor’, an online system to connect patients with available doctors for consultation, without physically visiting the doctor’s premises.

Forty teams with a total of almost 200 students registered for the Khalifa University Summer Challenge 2020, thus demonstrating an impressive interest in solving an emerging problem amid COVID-19. From the 40 teams, 11 made it to the final stage of the challenge that encouraged students in Grades 11-12 from across the UAE to design the app for smartphones and desktops. The panel of judges evaluated the submissions based on criteria such as the number of supported information sources, communication response delays, versatility of implementation, user-friendliness including handling of ethics issues, doctor’s selection mechanism, and design aesthetics.

The top place winner was Future Youth, a team of four from Applied Technology High School, while the second position was awarded to the three-member team from Greenwood International School. The third slot went to Future Doctors, a four-member team – three from Al Naeem School, and one member from Applied Technology High School.

The fourth position was won by eRescue, a team of five, out of which four were from Al Manhal International Private School with one member from Al Nahda International School, while the fifth place went to Almualej, a four-member team from Um Al Arab School.

Dr. Arif Sultan Al Hammadi, Executive VicePresident, Khalifa University of Science and Technology, said: “The Khalifa University Summer

Challenge 2020 is one of the innovation-related initiatives, launched during the COVID-19 pandemic to encourage involvement of high school students in critical thinking and scientific development. The projects submitted by students displayed their knowledge in STEM fields as well as highly-tuned social awareness during these challenging times. As a result they were able to design an online consultation system that could be suitable to anyone, not only in this region, but anywhere across the world. We are delighted that Khalifa University’s summer challenge has produced interest in youth to design such impactful innovations to tackle real world challenges such as the healthcare emergencies.”

The judges commended the students for their willingness to deal with both from the engineering and humanitarian angles, and create a viable solution to help the UAE community with worldwide impact, placing their approach in more of a ‘global-local’ perspective.

The Khalifa University Summer Challenge 2020 called for students to design the eDoctor system to prove its usefulness to urgent cases that cannot reach hospital, emergency cases that do not have doctors in an area, late-night emergencies, and for preliminary examination of patients.

While there was no bar on use of software, judges also looked for information exchange such as photo/video capturing, chatting, emailing, audio recording, GPS tracking, and emergency calls. Teams were also urged to incorporate additional features such as a real-time communication protocol, along with emergency level settings and uploading capabilities for combined analyses, reports or prescriptions.

63 KU TIMES

FROM THE NEWSROOM

New Research Project Aims to Advance the UAE’s Leadership in Artificial Intelligence

In support of the UAE taking the lead in the realm of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Khalifa University has signed a sponsored research agreement with Sandooq Al Watan and United Arab Emirates University with the goal of advancing cognitive computing using novel architecture and highgrade materials. The project was awarded under the SWARD program, which aims to create tangible social and economic outcomes in the country by bridging the gap between academia and industry.

KU TIMES 64

FROM THE NEWSROOM

Titled: ‘Doped Phase Change Material Nanowires for

university and a reliable fundamental pillar for the

Memory Applications,’ the project, which has a budget

development of scientific research.“

of AED 1 million, will explore the potential of developing new materials to progress AI processing and in-

Dr. Arif Sultan Al Hammadi, Executive Vice-President,

memory applications in the area of ‘non-von Neumann

Khalifa University of Science and Technology, said:

architecture.’

“We are delighted to be part of this project that will fabricate devices using nanowires and investigate

Discussing the nature of the project, His Excellency

their electrical performance. Faculty experts at Khalifa

Ahmed Fikri, Acting Director General of Sandooq Al

University’s research centers have the capability and

Watan said: “with researchers reporting the first ever

expertise to deliver not only integrated system-on-chip

in-memory computing , we see the future of cognitive

(SoC) solutions but also other advanced technology

computing in synchronised processing and memory

innovations in intelligent systems, robotics, and

functions. This in-memory computing relies on nano-

machine learning to drive innovation. We believe our

resistive memory devices made from specific materials,

support will remain integral to the success of this

with ‘Germanium Telluride’ (GeTe) being one of the most

project and we foresee similar collaborations with

viable. This project has been established to explore the

more research organizations in the future.”

potential for scalability of this material into nanowires to create substantive leaps in AI capacity.”

The project will be led by Principal Investigators Dr. Haila M. Aldosari, Assistant Professor, Physics, at

He continued: “We are blessed with having some of the

UAE University and Dr. Baker Mohammad, Associate

top minds working in the realm of AI, robotics, machine

Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering at

learning and indeed all areas of Fourth Industrial

Khalifa University. They will work together with a

Revolution technology in our country. Researchers from

team of research associates and postdoctoral fellows,

United Arab Emirates University and Khalifa University

while the research project will present internship

are at the forefront of the field and we anticipate

opportunities for UAE national students.

that this project will see major strides being made in harmonising processing and memory in AI, furthering

The aim of this latest SWARD project is the

the position of the UAE in this rapidly evolving sphere.”

optimization of material, device, and architecture to enable in-memory computing for Internet of

Prof. Ahmed Murad, Associate Provost for Research

Things (IoT) devices and Artificial Intelligence (AI)

from United Arab Emirates University – emphasized the

applications. This project explores the development of

leading role of the University in conducting high quality

the phase change material germanium telluride (GeTe)

research to support the national agenda. He added

for resistive memory, enabling efficient in-memory

that this project with Sandooq Al Watan and Khalifa

computations with extremely low power and high-

University comes in line with UAEU’s plan to develop the

density memory. The project will also investigate the

collaboration with other organizations to carry out joint

functionality of GeTe material using diameters of 10

research, especially in the field of Artificial Intelligence,

nanometers or less – tolerances that have never been

which represents a vibrant area of research at the

achieved before.

65 KU TIMES

FROM THE NEWSROOM

Department of Community Development and Universities MoU The Department of Community Development (DCD) in Abu Dhabi announced the signing of MoUs, experience exchange and social issues studies with three universities: United Arab Emirates University, Zayed University and Khalifa University. The signing ceremony was held at DCD’s headquarters, and the MoU aims to strengthen cooperation in the field of scientific research to monitor, study, and analyze social issues in the emirates of Abu Dhabi.

The agreement with the universities will contribute in exchange KU TIMES 66

experiences in the field of community service that will leave a positive impact on the community through social studies and the exchange of necessary data for the implementation process of those studies.

H.E Dr. Mugheer Khamis Al Khaili, Chairman of the Department of Community Development, said: “This is an important step for the department and Abu Dhabi government in acquiring data that helps decision-makers to set laws, policies and take future decisions to achieve a safe and dignified community, which is consistent with our vision in providing a dignified life for all, and making this an advanced community in sustainability and future foresight.”

Al Khaili added: “Community development is a shared responsibility, and today we are pleased to collaborate with academic universities by signing a memorandum of understanding (MoU) and work side by side in creating innovative solutions for the challenges that the community faces in accordance with the best international standards and practices.”

Al Khaili added: “Monitoring contributes in strengthening the community’s family cohesion, and this is one of the main priorities of the department to ensure a community that is tolerant to all segments of society, and to activate the role of community members and provide them with a happy and active life, which in return be reflected in the community to peruse success and achievements.”

FROM THE NEWSROOM

Dr. Arif Sultan Al Hammadi, Executive Vice-President, Khalifa University, said: “We are honored to collaborate with the Department of Community Development to exchange experience in the field of monitoring, studying and analyzing social behaviors in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, which would help improve the quality of life for the community.

Since inception, Khalifa University has been utilizing its capabilities and expertise to serve the community and work towards advancing the standard of life for individuals by finding innovative research solutions to challenges faced by the society, especially those related to healthcare, security and education. We thank the Department of Community Development for this important partnership and we look forward to more joint initiatives between the government and academia to further develop and sustain the UAE’s leading status in enhanced social standards.”

Her Excellency Noura Bint Mohammed Al Kaabi, Minister of Culture and Youth, President of Zayed University, expressed her enthusiasm towards the partnership between Zayed University (ZU) and the Department of Community Development (DCD)- Abu Dhabi.

She appreciated the constructive efforts undertaken by the department with the aim of establishing an integrated system for the social sector in the emirate, and the drive towards encouraging a wider participation of social work, as well as promoting community service values, encouraging and enabling stakeholders of the sector to further accomplish their

goals, and working to monitor and track and maintaining the positive address of societal challenges and behaviors.

Her Excellency noted that through the setting of incentives and initiatives, it directly efforts in raising awareness amongst the community on societal issues. She acknowledged that this partnership establishes a stronger relationship between the two parties and provides opportunities for the exchange of knowledge and the development of shared objectives.

Her Excellency reaffirmed that the MoU will bear many fruits, including strengthening cooperation in research activities that rely on field experience in extracting information from relevant sources.

“We are confident that this cooperation will serve as a platform for the exchange of knowledge between us, as it will provide the opportunity for researchers at ZU to work side by side with DCD’s experts and participate in what is necessary to support the tasks that the two sides carry out under this agreement”, she said.

She also highlighted the importance of maintaining a long term relationship and consolidating efforts between ZU and DCD that is rooted in a strategic vision that aims at exploring growing opportunities for joint initiatives by embracing methods that serve developmental goals and achieve mutual benefit.

Prof. Ghaleb Ali Albreiki, Acting Vice Chancellor of the UAE University

highlighted the importance of signing a memorandum of understanding with the Department of Community Development, which comes in line with the university’s vision and strategy. It is intended to enhance cooperation with various national institutions and bodies, to provide services according to the highest standards of quality and efficiency, and to create a link between the academics and the executive authorities as well.

He added, “this memorandum is expected to have a positive impact on the level of monitoring and studying social phenomena by employing scientific expertise in the UAE University, University of the Future.

The University plays a pivotal role of leadership and scientific excellence in order to achieve the vision of the leadership in achieving sustainable development. It also contributes to achieving the requirements of the UAE for the progress and well-being of the society, strengthening the happiness system, and achieving the UAE’s vision in preparing for the next 50 years. He also indicated, “the UAEU focuses through its vision and strategy on providing the necessary support for community institutions in the country, through the university’s qualitative and distinguished production of academic research, knowledge development, measurement and evaluation.

It is according to an advanced educational system that promotes building the tolerant UAE personality, and excellence, creativity and innovation opportunities for future generations.”

67 KU TIMES

FACULTY SPOTLIGHT

Expert insights from KU’s worldclass faculty

Drones as a Vital Asset amid Covid-19

BY DR. ATHOL YATES

Covid-19 may be the tipping point for the drones, or unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), industry. Drone technologies are being incorporated in every possible solution to help contain the spread of the virus, with governments across the globe engaging them to disinfect, sterilize, assess, and manage social distancing in public areas.

I recently chaired a webinar hosted by Messe Frankfurt Middle East’s Intersec, where Dubai Police and drone vendors discussed leveraging drones and smart technologies to combat the virus spread and make the city safer.

Covid-19 has accelerated many changes that were already underway in society. Think of remote working – six months ago it was limited to a very small percentage of the workforce. Today, it’s quite common.

Another is the use of drones. At the beginning of the year, while defence, border security, municipal and critical infrastructure agencies were doing multiple demonstration projects with drones, only a few actually deployed them.

Covid-19 has shown us the benefits of drones and now more agencies are experimenting with them, and a number have deployed them. A great example is the Dubai Police. I was joined by Lieutenant Engineer Saif Alhaj for an overview of how the Dubai Police have used drones during the pandemic.

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FACULTY SPOTLIGHT

They’ve been experimenting with them for a number of years and have been using them operationally more recently. During Covid-19 they continued to deploy them, undertaking tasks that they hadn’t used them for in the past, let alone thought about! In many ways, Dubai Police is a world leader in the application of drones for safety and security.

The UAE is also a leader in R&D on drones. We’ve seen this at KU where we have two research centers, which undertake significant drone research and development activities with both the UAE government and the private sector.

One of these centers is the Khalifa University Center for Cyber-Physical Systems (C2PS), and it has ongoing projects involving the secure operation of drones via location-based authorization of drone flights and the leveraging of internet-of-things data for application in the safe operation of drones. The Khalifa University Center for Autonomous Robotic Systems (KUCARS) has multiple research thrusts that involve drones. One such thrust is the use of drones in extreme environments, such as using them for fighting building fires. The center currently has a project supported by Emaar on this very topic. Another thrust includes the use of drones to inspect structures such as large aircrafts. The center also oversees the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge, which poses multiple state-of-the-art challenges in drone operation.

The university is always interested in collaboration with other government agencies and the private sector.

The webinar that I moderated focused on two aspects of drones. First, how drones can be used in a pandemic to disinfect, sterilize, assess and patrol in an effort to control and prevent the virus spreading. Second, the benefits and limitations of drones during times of pandemics as a mechanism for protecting employees while continuing and more efficiently delivering business outputs.

For Dubai Police, drones are not seen as a toys— they’re used because there is a sound business case for

employing them. The police have moved away from seeing drones as a technology in search for an application to seeing the benefits they can deliver for the police.

Comparing an agency’s use of drones is challenging as there aren’t benchmarks that are generally available.

Agencies around the world are reluctant to share information on the operational use of drones, even to similar agencies, which makes benchmarking and best practice identification difficult. To overcome this, Dubai Police has been working with other countries directly to develop mechanisms for benchmarking against other leaders to improve drone usage and technology.

I was also joined by Zeting Wang from Dahua Technology from the People’s Republic of China to discuss how drones were used in China during the Covid-19 epidemic.

During the initial lockdown of Wuhan, the city in China where Covid-19 was first identified, drones were used to broadcast messages to stay indoors and quarantine, and also to enable mass disinfection of public areas. Drones became effective in preventing disease and controlling the virus spread in the city. They were employed in aerial patrols, delivering hospital supplies, and even helping to build the Huoshenhan hospital by providing night lighting.

I took three main points away from the webinar. First, when it comes to thinking about drone technology, it’s not about the drones themselves; it’s about how they can achieve business outputs, as measured in productivity, cost, and safety. From the discussion part of this event, we found that the issue of privacy is a key concern for users of drones, and I think we all need to remember that concerns about privacy are very much an issue that needs to be understood in the context of culture and local circumstances.

The final key element is the issue of risk. It was great to see the speakers talk about the use of risk management strategies and recognizing that managing risks is one of the key elements of any new technology.

Dr. Athol Yates is Assistant Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Khalifa University.

69 KU TIMES

FACULTY SPOTLIGHT

IICS Faculty Serves as Guest Editor of the Small Wars & Insurgencies Journal Dr. Ash Rossiter, Assistant Professor of the Institute of International and Civil Security (IICS) and the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, has guest edited a special issue of the Q1 Scopuslisted journal Small Wars & Insurgencies.

Tackling the issue of the role of Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) in contemporary and future conflict, the recently published special issue features contributions from leading security studies scholars, including KU’s very own Dr. Brendon J. Cannon, Assistant Professor of the IICS and the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Dr. Kucukalic to Publish Book on Artistic and Scientific Approaches to Genetics

Dr. Lejla Kucukalic from the Department of English has been awarded a book contract for her monograph titled “BIOFICTIONS: Literary and Visual Imagination in the Age of Biotechnology.” The book will be published by Routledge in the publisher’s Focus Series, which aims to present innovative research on important topics that intersect academic and real worlds. Dr. Kucukalic’s book addresses artistic and scientific approaches to genetics and discusses topics in bioethics, biosemiotics, science fiction, and literary theory.

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FACULTY SPOTLIGHT

Humanities & Social Sciences Faculty Participate in Panel about Gender Equality and Entrepreneurship Dr. Gina Poncini and Professor Glenn Muschert of the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences were part of a panel of experts who discussed gender equality and entrepreneurship in the UAE. Listen to the recording of the webcast here.

LISTEN TO WEBCAST

KU Assistant Professor Co-Writes Report on Russia’s Impact on US National Interests

Assistant Professor Dr. Li-Chen Sim wrote a section for a report commissioned by the Belfer Center at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

The report titled “Russia’s Impact on US National Interests: Ensuring Energy Security” was commissioned ahead of the US presidential elections in November 2020 to explain key aspects of US national interests. Li-Chen Sim’s contribution examined how Russia affects US energy security by desegregating the impact of different fuel types – oil, gas, coal, nuclear, and renewables.

READ THE REPORT HERE.

71 KU TIMES

FACULTY SPOTLIGHT

Prolific Professors

Published Papers

TITLE The early mortality rate of people infected with coronavirus (COVID-2019) in Wuhan, China: Review of three retrospective studies JOURNAL Journal of Pharmacy & BioAllied Sciences KU AUTHOR Dr. Noora Al-Hajri, Epidemiology & Population Health Instructor LINK OPEN LINK

TITLE Fast and efficient removal of paraquat in water by porous polycalix[n]arenes (n = 4, 6, and 8)†JOURNAL Journal of Materials Chemistry A KU AUTHOR Dr. Dinesh Shetty, Assistant Professor of Chemistry LINK OPEN LINK

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TITLE Moment Problems in weighted L2 spaces on the real line JOURNAL Ural Mathematical Journal KU AUTHOR Dr. Elias Zikkos, Preparatory Program Senior Lecturer LINK OPEN LINK

TITLE Asymptotic properties of a φ-Laplacian and Rayleigh quotient JOURNAL Commentationes Mathematicae Universitatis Carolinae KU AUTHOR Dr. Waldo Arriagada, Assistant Professor of Mathematics

TITLE Parametric rigidity of the Hopf bifurcation up to analytic conjugacy JOURNAL Periodica Mathematica Hungarica (Accepted for Publication) KU AUTHOR Dr. Waldo Arriagada, Assistant Professor of Mathematics

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TITLE Fast and Efficient Removal of Paraquat in Water by Porous Polycalix[n]arenes (n = 4, 6, and 8)†JOURNAL Journal of Materials Chemistry A KU AUTHOR Dr. Dinesh Shetty, Assistant Professor of Chemistry LINK OPEN LINK

TITLE The Impact of Military Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) Across the Conflict Spectrum JOURNAL Small Wars & Insurgencies KU AUTHOR Dr. Ash Rossiter, Assistant Professor of the Institute of International and Civil Security LINK OPEN LINK

TITLE Bots on the Ground: An Impending UGV Revolution in Military Affairs?

JOURNAL Small Wars & Insurgencies KU AUTHOR Dr. Ash Rossiter, Assistant Professor of the Institute of International and Civil Security LINK OPEN LINK

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TITLE What’s In It for Us? Armed Drone Strikes and the Security of Somalia’s Federal Government JOURNAL Small Wars & Insurgencies KU AUTHOR Dr. Brendon J. Cannon, Assistant Professor of the Institute of International and Civil Security LINK OPEN LINK

TITLE Forging a Force: Rulers, Professional Expatriates, and the Creation of Abu Dhabi’s Police JOURNAL Middle Eastern Studies KU AUTHOR Dr. Athol Yates and Dr. Ash Rossiter, Assistant Professors of the Institute of International and Civil Security LINK OPEN LINK

TITLE Visible-Light Driven Photocatalytic Degradation of Pirimicarb by Pt-Doped AgInS2 Nanoparticles JOURNAL Catalysts KU AUTHOR Dr. Shaya Janah, College of Medicine and Health Sciences Senior Instructor LINK OPEN LINK

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TITLE The Role of Serotonin in Singultus: A Review JOURNAL frontiers in Neuroscience KU AUTHOR Dr. Georg A. Petroianu, Associate Dean for Research of the College of Medicine and Health Sciences and Dr. Dietrich Lorke, Chair of Anatomy and Cellular Biology LINK OPEN LINK

TITLE Superposition of Semiconductor and Semi-metal Properties of Self-assembled 2D SnTiS3 Heterostructures JOURNAL NPJ 2D Materials and Applications (a Nature publication) KU AUTHOR Dr. Jin-You Lu, Mechanical Engineering Research Scientist; Dr. Nitul Rajput, Mechanical Engineering Research Scientist; Boulos Alfakes, Mechanical Engineering Graduate Student; Harry Apostoleris, Mechanical Engineering Graduate Student; Dr. Shashikant P. Patole, Assistant Professor of Physics; and Dr. Matteo Chiesa, Professor of Mechanical Engineering LINK OPEN LINK

TITLE A Droplet Reactor on a Super-hydrophobic Surface Allows Control and Characterization of Amyloid Fibril Growth JOURNAL Communication Biology (a Nature publication) KU AUTHOR Dr. Gobind Das, Associate Professor of Physics LINK OPEN LINK

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TITLE Giant Controllable Gigahertz to Terahertz Nonlinearities in Superlattices (Accepted) JOURNAL Scientific Reports (Nature Research) KU AUTHOR Dr. Mauro Fernandes Pereira, Professor of Physics

TITLE Assimilating Unidimensional and Multidimensional Models of Political Values (Accepted) JOURNAL International Journal of Public Opinion Research KU AUTHOR Dr. Michael Babula, Assistant Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences

TITLE The Islamic Episteme of Development of Polities in International Affairs (Accepted) JOURNAL Politics and Religion Journal KU AUTHOR Dr. Labeeb Ahmed Bsoul, Associate Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences

TITLE Early Islamic Tarjamah (translation) and al-Muthaqafah (acculturation) and its position in human civilization JOURNAL The Journal of Rotterdam of Islamic Social Sciences (JRISS), vol. 10, no, 1, 23 April, 2020: 39-6 KU AUTHOR Dr. Labeeb Ahmed Bsoul, Associate Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences 77 KU TIMES

FACULTY SPOTLIGHT

TITLE Computational Investigation of N2O Adsorption and Dissociation on the Silicon-embedded Graphene Catalyst: A Density Functional Theory Perspective JOURNAL Journal of Molecular Graphics and Modelling KU AUTHOR Dr. Mutasem Sinnokrot, Senior Lecturer, Chemistry Department, Research and Innovation Center on CO2 and H2 (RICH) LINK OPEN LINK

TITLE Adapting Premedical Post-Baccalaureate Approaches to Support US-style Medical Education in the United Arab Emirates JOURNAL Journal of Medical Education and Curricular Development KU AUTHOR Dr. Shaya Janah, Senior Instructor of the College of Medicine and Health Sciences; Dr. Peter Corridon, Assistant Professor of Physiology and Immunology; and Dr. Habiba Alsafar, Director of the KU Center for Biotechnology LINK OPEN LINK

TITLE Implications of a Regional Order in Flux: Chinese and Russian Relations with the United Arab Emirates JOURNAL Cambridge Review of International Affairs KU AUTHOR Li-Chen Sim, Assistant Professor of Humanities & Social Sciences LINK OPEN LINK

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TITLE The Position of the Common Facial Vein in Neonates: An Alternate Route for Central Venous Catheter Placement JOURNAL Clinical Anatomy KU AUTHOR Dr. Nathalie Keough, Assistant Professor of Anatomy and Cell Biology LINK OPEN LINK

TITLE Myrcene Attenuates Renal Inflammation and Oxidative Stress in the Adrenalectomized Rat Model JOURNAL Molecules KU AUTHOR Dr. Georg Petroianu, Professor & Chair, Pharmacology and Therapeutics & Associate Dean for Research; and Dr. Abdu Adem, Professor of Pharmacology LINK OPEN LINK

TITLE Prevention and Management of Type 2 Diabetes and Metabolic Syndrome in the Time of COVID-19: Should We Add a Cup of Coffee?

JOURNAL Frontiers in Nutrition KU AUTHOR Dr. Sabina Semiz, Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics LINK OPEN LINK

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TITLE Frontiers and Advances in Green and Sustainable Inhibitors for Corrosion Applications: A Critical Review JOURNAL Journal of Molecular Liquids KU AUTHOR Dr. Ahsanulhaq Qurashi, Associate Professor of Chemistry LINK OPEN LINK

TITLE Electrochemical Synthesis of Amorphous Nickel Sulfide Nanostructured Film Photocathode for Solar Hydrogen Production JOURNAL World Journal of Chemical Education KU AUTHOR Dr. Ahsanulhaq Qurashi, Associate Professor of Chemistry LINK OPEN LINK

TITLE Nursing People with Osteoarthritis JOURNAL British Journal of Nursing KU AUTHOR Dr. Basem Al-Omari, Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health LINK OPEN LINK

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TITLE Deep Learning based Semantic Segmentation of µCT Images for Creating Digital Material Twins of Fibrous Reinforcements JOURNAL Composites Part A: Applied Science and Manufacturing KU AUTHOR Dr. Muhammad A. Ali, Aerospace Engineering Postdoctoral Fellow; Qiangshun Guan, Mechanical Engineering Graduate Student; Dr. Rehan Umer, Associate Professor of Aerospace Engineering; Wesley J. Cantwell, Professor and Director of the Aerospace Research & Innovation Center; and Dr. TieJun Zhang, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering LINK OPEN LINK

TITLE Kinematics of Photoisomerization Processes of PMMA-BDK-MR Polymer Composite Thin Films JOURNAL Polymers KU AUTHOR Dr. Issam Qattan, Associate Professor of Physics LINK OPEN LINK

TITLE Measurement and ab initio Investigation of Structural, Electronic, Optical, and Mechanical Properties of Sputtered Aluminum Nitride Thin Films JOURNAL Frontiers in Physics KU AUTHOR Dr. Issam Qattan, Associate Professor of Physics LINK OPEN LINK

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TITLE Suppression of Hard Two-Photon-Exchange Contributions to Re+e- Elastic Scattering Cross-section Ratios: A Phenomenological Approach JOURNAL Physical Review C KU AUTHOR Dr. Issam Qattan, Associate Professor of Physics LINK OPEN LINK

TITLE Structural, Optoelectrical, Linear, and Nonlinear Optical Characterizations of Dip-Synthesized Undoped ZnO and Group III Elements (B, Al, Ga, and In)-Doped ZnO Thin Films JOURNAL Crystals KU AUTHOR Dr. Issam Qattan, Associate Professor of Physics LINK OPEN LINK

TITLE Optical, Structural, and Crystal Defects Characterizations of Dip Synthesized (Fe-Ni) Co-Doped ZnO Thin Films JOURNAL Materials KU AUTHOR Dr. Issam Qattan, Associate Professor of Physics LINK OPEN LINK

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TITLE Effect of Bromine Deficiency on Large Elastic Moduli of Alpha-Phase Diisopropyl Ammonium Bromide (α-DIPAB) Molecular Crystals JOURNAL The European Physical Journal B KU AUTHOR Dr. Issam Qattan, Associate Professor of Physics LINK OPEN LINK

TITLE Theoretical and Experimental Overview of Structural, Dielectric, Crystallographic, Electronic, Optical, and Physical Tensors of α-DIPAB and Iodine-Doped α-DIPAB Molecular Ferroelectric Crystals JOURNAL Journal of Electronic Materials KU AUTHOR Dr. Issam Qattan, Associate Professor of Physics LINK OPEN LINK

TITLE Challenging the Accepted Understanding of the Executive Branch of the UAE’s Federal Government JOURNAL Middle Eastern Studies KU AUTHOR Dr. Athol Yates, Assistant Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences LINK OPEN LINK

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TITLE Low-Carbon Energy in the Gulf: Upending the Rentier State?

JOURNAL Energy Research & Social Science KU AUTHOR Dr. Li-Chen Sim, Assistant Professor of Humanities & Social Sciences LINK OPEN LINK

TITLE Giant Controllable Gigahertz to Terahertz Nonlinearities in Superlattices JOURNAL Scientific Reports KU AUTHOR Dr. Mauro Fernandes Pereira, Professor of Physics LINK OPEN LINK

TITLE Green Synthesis, Characterization, Antimicrobial, Anti-Cancer, and Optimization of Colorimetric Sensing of Hydrogen Peroxide of Algae Extract Capped Silver Nanoparticles JOURNAL Nanomaterials KU AUTHOR Dr. Mohammad Abu Haija, Associate Professor of Chemistry and Dr. Shashikant Patole, Assistant Professor of Physics LINK OPEN LINK

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TITLE Cardiovascular and Quality of Life Outcomes of a 3-Month Physical Exercise Program in Two Brazilian Communities JOURNAL Frontiers in Medicine KU AUTHOR Dr. Ovidiu Baltatu, Professor of Pharmacology LINK OPEN LINK

TITLE The Association Between Social Support and Psychological Distress in Latina Mothers Living in Miami-Dade County, Florida JOURNAL Cureus KU AUTHOR Dr. Juan Acuna, Associate Professor & Chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health LINK OPEN LINK

TITLE COVID-19: Topical Agents and Therapeutic Prevention of Nasal Viral Acquisition JOURNAL Dermatologic Therapy KU AUTHOR Dr. Zbigniew Ruszczak, Associate Professor of Medicine LINK OPEN LINK

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TITLE On the Analysis of a Summertime Convective Event in a Hyperarid Environment JOURNAL Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society KU AUTHOR Dr. Diana Francis, Senior Research Scientist, Chemical Engineering; Dr. Ricardo Morais Fonseca, Research Scientist, External Fund; Dr. Narendra Reddy Nelli, Postdoctoral Fellow, External Fund; Dr. Rachid Abida, Research Scientist, Nuclear Engineering; and Dr. Michael John Weston, Research Engineer, External Fund LINK OPEN LINK

TITLE Detection and Quantification of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in Wastewater and Treated Effluents: Surveillance of COVID-19 Epidemic in the United Arab Emirates JOURNAL Science of the Total Environment KU AUTHOR Dr. Shadi Hasan, Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering; Dr. Yazan Ibrahim, Research Associate, Chemistry; Dr. Mariane Daou, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Chemistry; Dr. Hussein Kannout, Research Associate, Biomedical Engineering; Dr. Nila Jan, Research Assistant, Chemistry; Dr. Habiba Alsafar, Associate Professor and Director of the KU Center for Biotechnology; and Dr. Ahmed Yousef, Assistant Professor of Chemistry LINK OPEN LINK

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TITLE The Sociopolitical Factors Impacting the Adoption and Proliferation of Desalination: A Critical Review JOURNAL ScienceDirect KU AUTHOR Yazan Ibrahim, Research Engineer, CMAT; Roqaya A. Ismail, Graduate Student, Civil Infrastructure And Environmental Engineering; Adetola Ogungbenro, Graduate Student, Chemical Engineering; Dr. Fawzi Banat, Department Chair, Chemical Engineering; and Dr. Hassan A. Arafat, Professor of Chemical Engineering LINK OPEN LINK

Patent Issued Two back-to-back US patents were filed on September 15 on establishing the highly innovative concept of involvement of magnetic field in separating mixtures: ”Magnetic Swing Absorption”, USPTO No. 63/078,433, and “Magnetic-Based Determination of Sorption Separation Factor for Binary Gas Mixtures”, USPTO No. 63/078,364, by Dr. Georgios Karanikolos from Chemical Engineering and collaborators from the Demokritos National Research Center in Athens. The work was funded by the Gas Research Center and supported by the Center for Catalysis and Separations (CeCaS).

87 KU TIMES

INNOVATION FORWARD

Cutting-edge research and breakthroughs

Keeping Solar Nanofluids Stable

Concentrating solar power (CSP) plants – which use energy from the sun in the form of heat to generate clean electricity – could one day be used to meet a significant share of the world’s energy needs. But CSP faces a challenge: many power plants still rely on heat transfer fluids that were developed in the 1980s and are limited to lower operating temperatures.

Heat transfer fluids bring the heat collected from solar energy to a generator, where it is transformed into electricity. The hotter the fluid can get, the more its particles move and the higher its thermal energy, which translates into more efficient power generation.

Nanofluids have been eyed as advanced heat transfer fluids for some time now, as the nanoparticles suspended in the fluid increase the fluid’s absorption surface area and thermal conductivity. However, solar nanofluids are challenged by instability, mainly caused by the clustering of nanoparticles within the fluid.

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Now, scientists at Khalifa University are researching how these nanofluids can be stabilized, which is key to accelerating their uptake in CSP plants, and other industrial applications, around the world.

Dr. Omar Sharaf, Post-Doctoral Fellow at Khalifa University, with Dr. Eiyad Abu-Nada, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and Dr. Robert Taylor, Associate Professor of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering at University of New South Wales, Sydney, recently published a review paper in Physics Reports covering the topic of solar nanofluids to investigate their colloidal and chemical stability in various applications.

“Nanofluids are engineered colloidal dispersions with solid inorganic nanoparticles,” explained Dr. Sharaf. “They have superior thermophysical properties that make them excellent materials for numerous engineering applications, including solar power generation.”

INNOVATION FORWARD

“But while a few review articles have previously targeted the issue of stability for thermal nanofluids, which allow for more effective heat transfer, there are no review articles covering the stability of solar nanofluids, which function as both solar absorbers and heat carriers,” added Dr. Abu-Nada.

“Therefore, our objective was to provide a much-needed, state-of-the-art review of the stability of solar nanofluids and investigate the modern techniques and strategies to overcome their limitations.

We’ve made an important step towards understanding the state-of-the-art in the development of resilient, longterm stable solar nanofluids for use in photothermal conversion applications.”

Nanofluids are increasingly used in applications requiring quick and effective heat transfer, including in solar thermal applications. They absorb the solar irradiance passing through them, which allows the base fluid to effectively capture and transport solar radiation. The more solar energy the nanofluid absorbs, the more efficient the photothermal conversion process, with the solar thermal system’s efficiency governed by the effectiveness of the photothermal conversion and heat transfer processes.

An ideal direct-absorption solar collector will absorb the concentrated solar radiation, convert that into heat, and transfer the heat to the intended application. Nanoparticles allow for several orders of magnitude higher heat transfer when absorbing solar radiation directly within the surrounding fluid, simply due to the small size and huge specific surface area of the nanoparticles.

“Despite their favorable thermophysical properties, the key challenge still hindering the widespread use and commercialization of solar nanofluids are issues pertaining to their dispersion and chemical stability,” explained Dr. Sharaf. “This is a result of operating for prolonged periods of time under the rough outdoor conditions encountered in photothermal conversion devices, such as elevated temperature, intense solar radiation, and thermal and solar cycling. Such conditions destabilize the nanofluids, eventually leading to those prized properties being significantly altered.”

Nanoparticles have exceptionally high surface-to-volume ratios and remain in a high energy state. As the particles move to reduce their surface energies, they cluster together, which reduces their efficiency. A nanofluid’s ability to resist clustering is known as its colloidal stability. Its chemical stability is determined by the ability to resist undesired chemical transformations over time.

“In other words, a stable nanofluid is one that retains its optical and thermal properties of interest after frequent use in its intended application,” explained Dr. Abu-Nada. “Depending on the nature of the solar photothermal conversion device, a solar nanofluid can be exposed to a number of destabilizing factors.

Understanding these factors is crucial for designing a stable nanofluid.”

The working temperature of a solar nanofluid could be high during the day and low during the night due to solar cycling, reaching very high temperatures of much more than 400C

in photothermal devices operating under concentrated solar radiation.

Temperature variations can trigger sharp transitions from stability to instability, with parts of the nanofluid known to partially or even completely decompose and detach from the particles at working temperatures as low as 60C. “In sunny, desert climates, where solar collectors are likely to be deployed, the difference between nanofluid temperature at daytime and night time could be significant, especially when operating under concentrated solar radiation,” explained Dr. Abu-Nada.

“Additionally, although it constitutes a small portion of the solar radiation hitting the Earth, UV radiation can cause severe damage to the constituents of a nanofluid, especially if optically concentrated.

Prolonged UV radiation exposure is more often than not overlooked as a major destabilizing factor, because upon testing under natural sunlight for a limited period of time, the levels of exposure are not usually enough to induce too much damage.

However, upon prolonged exposure, it is clear that UV exposure can have hugely detrimental effects.”

As energy demand across the globe increases, harnessing renewable energy remains essential. Concentrating sunlight is an effective way to generate higher output and nanofluids can play a crucial role in the development of these technologies.

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The Wide-Reaching Effects of River Basin Salinization

It is widely accepted that rising salt levels in our soils, rivers and streams is a major environmental issue worldwide. Still, little has been done to understand the long-term impacts of river salinization on the terrestrial water budget and climate.

An analysis by researchers at Khalifa University has now found that soil salinization – the accumulation of soluble salts in the soil – also affects the way river basins and their hydrology interact with climate.

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The study, published recently in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, shows that salinization enhances the aridity of river basins, reducing the capability of vegetation to take up water from the soil and release it to the atmosphere; a process called transpiration.

“Transpiration represents the main pathway through which water is transferred from land to the atmosphere and is a key driver of our climate,” explained Dr. Saverio Perri, post-doctoral fellow in Civil Infrastructure and Environmental Engineering at Khalifa University and the study’s lead author.

“As salts start to accumulate in the soil, osmotic effects make it more and more difficult for plants to take up water through their roots and transpiration is progressively impaired, affecting water and energy fluxes at the interface between land and atmosphere.”

“However, not all the plants respond to salinity the same way,” Dr. Perri added. “Halophytes (their name comes from the Ancient Greek words ἅλας, ‘salt’, and φυτόν, ‘plant’) can grow in salty soils and have developed hydraulic traits, which allow them to withstand salt stress and sustain transpiration under saline conditions, which many other crops and plants cannot.

As a consequence, plant salt tolerance could significantly impact how land exchanges water with the atmosphere and controls climate.”

“The other crucial factor to keep in mind is the size of the phenomenon,” said Dr. Annalisa Molini, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and a co-author of the study. “River salinization has grown at an unprecedented rate in the last few decades, and is now a global environmental issue.”

“We have estimated that river basin salinization already affects more than one-third of catchments around the world. This is a huge area – millions of hectares – where salinity is not only a major cause of fertility reduction and soil degradation but also a powerful hydro-climatic driver,” Dr. Molini added.

“The majority of salt-affected basins can be found in the Middle East, Africa and Australia, all regions which are already experiencing extreme aridity, land degradation, and vulnerability to climate change.

Despite the global dimension of the problem, the effects of salinization are not included in climate models. These models cannot differentiate between vegetation types with different hydraulic traits.”

“Our study provides the essential machinery to understand how salinity can alter the local soil water balance and land-atmosphere interactions. A first vital step toward including salinity effects in climate models,” Dr. Molini shared.

The Khalifa University research team – including Dr. Perri, Dr. Molini and Dr. Prashanth Marpu, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science – worked with colleagues at the University di Padova, MIT and the New South Wales Rural Fire Service of Australia to develop a new model of the soil water balance in saline river basins. The novelty of the model is that it accounts for both the effects of salinity and plant salt tolerance.

“The beauty of the model is that it is rather simple, and still, it can capture the main components of the process, including the response of different types of vegetation,” said Dr. Perri.

“Also, it can be used to develop reverse-engineering strategies to mitigate salinization, based on plant salt tolerance. This paves the way for a wide range of applications which might help us to tackle the problem of salinization from the eco-hydrological perspective.”

The paper’s other co-authors include Dr. Samir Suweis of the University of Padova, Dr. Dara Entekhabi of MIT, and Dr. Alex Holmes from the New South Wales Rural Fire Service. Support for the research was provided by the Abu Dhabi Department of Education & Knowledge and by the University of Padova.

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How Dust Impacts the Arabian Climate

The Arabian Peninsula is one of the world’s major sources of dust year round, contributing substantially to the total amount of dust in the air in the Northern Hemisphere. Frequent dust storms occur here, between 15 to 20 per year, impacting all aspects of life for its human population, as well as affecting marine ecosystems and the climate.

Despite this, little is known about how and why dust storms are much more common in the summer months. A team from Khalifa University set out to better understand this phenomenon by examining the intense dust activity that occurred in July 2018.

Dr. Diana Francis, Senior Research Scientist, Dr. Narendra Nelli, Postdoctoral Fellow, and Dr. Marouane Temimi, Associate Professor of Civil Infrastructure and Environmental Engineering, all from Khalifa University, published their findings in Atmospheric Research along with Dr. Jean-Pierre Chaboureau, University of Toulouse, France, Dr. Juan Cuesta, UniversitĂŠ Paris-Est Creteil, France, Noor Alshamsi, UAE National Center for Meteorology, Dr. Olivier Pauluis, New York University, and Dr. Lulin Xue, US National Center for Atmospheric Research. The team investigated the dust storms of July 2018 to identify the underlying atmospheric dynamics and assess how much impact the radiative effects of dust had on cloud and rain development.

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“Despite originating from relatively few areas around the world, atmospheric dust is an important component of the Earth’s climate system,” explained Dr. Francis. “Atmospheric dust particles can serve as cloud condensation nuclei and ice nucleating particles, thereby altering cloud development and properties and associated precipitation.”

The amount of dust in the air also influences radiative effects as dust particles can scatter and absorb shortwave radiation, and absorb and re-emit longwave radiation. This has repercussions for atmospheric thermodynamics as the local temperature, winds and rainfall are affected.

“The dust in the air interacts with radiation from the sun and increases the mass of water in the atmosphere, causing a greenhouse effect and further increasing the ground temperature and humidity,” explained Dr. Francis. “This then has implications on the development of weather features such as sea breezes.”

southern parts of the Arabian Peninsula peak in the summer.

“This peak indicates the existence of a still-unknown but important mechanism for dust emissions,” explained Dr. Francis. “Cyclogenesis, the formation of cyclone, has proven to be a major dust emission mechanism over other arid regions, capable of generating dramatic dust storms.

However, little attention has been given to dust activity associated with cyclogenesis over the Arabian Peninsula”.”

In July 2018, a cyclone formed over southwestern UAE and generated intense dust emissions over the UAE and northwestern Oman due to strong cyclonic winds.

“A clear footprint of the cloud was visible in the radiation measurements at the surface, with the warming effect by up to 10°C induced by the dust especially at night,” explained Dr. Francis.

Though the dust does reduce the amount of solar energy reaching the surface by absorbing and scattering the radiation, this absorption can contribute to localized heating by directly warming the dust-filled atmospheric layer and emitting longwave radiation towards the surface of the Earth.

This, however, depends on where the dust layer is located, such as whether it is situated over water, vegetated areas or desert regions.

“On the second day of cyclogenesis, clouds started to develop in the warm sector of the cyclone,” explained Dr. Francis. “Localized rain was observed in the southwestern UAE, and as the cyclone intensified, more water vapor was drawn from the Arabian Gulf and the Arabian Sea, which caused further rain to develop. Daytime ground temperatures were two degrees higher compared to prior days, while at night, temperatures were ten degrees higher than the normal temperature before and after the dust storm. This was due to sustained emissions of longwave radiation during the entire lifetime of the dust storm.”

“Given the sporadic nature of dust storms, this complex balance between their effects on radiation and the resulting impacts on climate has been difficult to assess,” explained Dr. Francis. “Because of this, dust storms can’t be included in future climate projections with much accuracy, with current global climate models underestimating the warming effect of dust by underestimating the actual amount of dust in the atmosphere.”

The researchers found that the dust over a major dust source region induces a significant net warming effect at the surface and in the atmosphere during the night, modifying the atmosphere at lower levels. Their results highlight the important role dust plays in the climate system of the Arabian Peninsula, proving that air quality and weather forecast systems need to account for the impacts of dust storms to achieve improved accuracy.

An essential part of the dust cycle is the transportation of dust around the world. For this, the dust storm needs the atmospheric processes that determine all aspects of the storm—from its intensity to its duration­. For the Arabian Peninsula, the Shamal winds play a critical role. These northerly semi-permanent winds are thought to be the main meteorological driver for dust emissions year round but Dr. Francis is interested in why dust emissions over the

“Dust also needs to be considered when predicting, designing and conducting cloud-seeding operations in the UAE because of the impact on the circulation, which in turn impacts the development of clouds and their lifetime,” added Dr. Francis.

“Dust is a quasi-permanent natural part of the atmosphere over the Arabian Peninsula, and its impact on the climate and environment of this region is more significant than anyone previously thought.”

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Khalifa University Team Uses Intelligence Systems to Predict Power Grid Stability As more intermittent renewable energy sources of electricity are fed into the grid, balancing the amount of electricity fed in against the amount of electricity consumed becomes more difficult. A team from Khalifa University has developed a software to accurately and quickly predict the stability of power grids.

Moursi, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, teamed up with the Abu Dhabi Transmission and Dispatch Company (TRANSCO) and Canadian company Manitoba Hydro International (MHI) to develop a software tool for fast and accurate online prediction of power system stability.

The journey of electricity, from the power plant to our homes and businesses, is not always a smooth one. Grid operators are faced with the complex task of balancing the amount of electricity fed into the grid against the amount of electricity consumed, to keep the power system stable. But as more intermittent renewable energy sources of electricity, like solar and wind, are fed into the grid, this balancing act is becoming even more challenging.

The KU research team members were Syafiq Kamarul Azman, Research Engineer, Dr. Younes Isbeih, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, and Dr. Khaled Elbassioni, Professor of Computer Science.

To address this challenge, a KU team led by Dr. Mohamed El

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Maintaining balance among power generation and consumption in an electrical network is extremely complex, especially when new intermittent sources of energy are installed as in the case of solar photovoltaic (PV) and wind power.

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Small changes to power grids, caused by load fluctuations or intermittency of renewable energy resources can drive the power system out of its safe operating range toward a critical state. In addition, power grids are frequently subjected to faults and equipment failures, either temporary or permanent, that can further derive the system to instability if proper monitoring and control actions are not taken. As a result, it is crucial that grid operators are equipped with the tools needed to maintain a stable operation of the grid and to build resilience to faults and disturbances.

The KU research team built a unified prediction model using artificial intelligence techniques to provide fast and accurate prediction of transient stability when a power system is disturbed.

“The dynamic response of a power system is governed by a set of highly nonlinear differential and algebraic equations (DAE), which describe the behavior of the generators and the associated control systems, loads, renewable power generation and flexible AC transmission devices (FACTs),” explained Dr. El Moursi.

When the overall demand load in a power system is suddenly increased, power plant power generators that have spinning generators are suddenly slowed. Differential and algebraic mathematical equations must be solved to determine the amount of accelerating power required to bring a power plant’s power generator back to a stable condition.

“When the power system experiences small changes, the mathematical model can be linearized about an equilibrium point to study the stability of the system,” explained Dr. El Moursi. “After a severe disturbance, however, the power generators are changed beyond the ability of the linearized model to describe the nonlinear dynamics that ensue and hence thus the model must be numerically solved through simulations.”

Time domain simulations are used to help solve these more complex challenges. While they accurately describe power system transient behavior, they are associated with a

considerable computational burden when applied to real systems where real-time frameworks are required for dynamic security assessment and control.

“Although time domain simulations result in an accurate transient stability assessment (TSA), they require considerable time and computational efforts, especially for large power systems with almost infinite number of contingencies and operating points,” said Dr. El Moursi.

This is where artificial neural networks and deep learning techniques are pivotal. Using deep learning techniques, the team from KU developed an approach for predicting both power system stability. The neural networks learn specific features of the power system dynamics and thus can provide fast and accurate online prediction of transient stability.

The model designed by the team provides a unified approach for prediction when the system is subjected to a disturbance. They trained a neural network using a set of transient responses seen across the entire power system and for a wide-range of operating conditions. The trained model provides a fast, yet accurate, prediction of the transient stability status when a power system is disturbed. If the system is unstable, the prediction model updates the power system operator with the necessary control actions.

“In a relatively short period of time, the KU project team successfully designed and built­—and is on the way to patenting—an artificial intelligence-based transient stability assessment tool with full functionality, flexibility, and high accuracy,” said Dr. Surour Mohamed Alaraifi, Senior Planning Engineer at TRANSCO and member in the project team. “We can now evaluate our system stability, including all interconnections, by simulations as short as 200 milliseconds, compared to the usual 30 to 35 seconds, allowing us to perform tasks like fast contingency screening, while covering generators, transmission lines, and transformer fault scenarios. We hope this tool becomes a central asset for our system operators.”

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3D Printed Transparent Rocks with Fluid Imaging Could Help Extract Energy from the Ground ELECTRON MICROSCOPY IMAGE OF THE COATED SAMPLE FOR THE TEAM’S 3D PRINTED RESERVOIR ROCK MODELS

Researchers at Khalifa University have developed a new way to 3D print reservoir rock replicas that have complex porous structures and mimic a carbonate rock’s natural mineralogy. The 3D printed rocks are transparent, and allow researchers to image precisely how fluid flows through the ultra-tiny pores of rock – information which could help develop effective strategies for hydrocarbon and geothermal energy extraction, carbon sequestration, and even ice mining and water extraction from the ground during planetary exploration.

“While recent improvements in 3D printing enable scientists to fabricate 3D structures that have complicated porous structures by using polymeric materials, these structures ultimately lack in surface functionality.

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We overcame this problem by integrating high-resolution 3D printing with an internal coating to create structures that functionally replicate the natural rock,” explained Dr. TieJun Zhang, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and the principal investigator of a reservoir characterization and modeling project. His team, which includes, Hongxia Li, Aikifa Raza, Qiaoyu Ge, and Jin-You Lu, recently published a paper in the journal Soft Matter describing the new micro3D printing and mineral coating technique. This approach has been filed as both International PCT and GCC Patents.

open the door to a vast array of opportunities in quickly modelling and predicting microfluidic flow behaviors in applications such as geology and hydrocarbon extraction.

Highly porous materials exist in all sorts of applications, from concrete and filtration to biology and oil and gas extraction. Engineers have been studying how fluids flow through porous materials for some time – a branch of study known as microfluidics. Because pore sizes can be as small as a single micrometer, and the porous material being studied can be in hard to reach places, like underground or within the human body, creating devices that can be used to simulate the way fluids flow through porous materials has been the primary way that scientists have advanced understanding of microfluidics.

3D printing has emerged as one solution to this but many of the issues in fabricating complicated porous networks arise from the limitations in printing materials.

Even better microfluidic devices, like the 3D printed porous structure developed by Dr. Zhang’s team, could

Traditional microfluidic chips show how fluids move through the pores of the rock and are typically made from glass or silicon. For some applications, this is enough, but carbonate rock is a material susceptible to fluids underground, and the microfluidic model needs to take into account the strong interactions between the fluid and the rock.

“Conventionally, we can enhance the thermal, electrical, and mechanical properties of 3D-printed devices by adding nanomaterials into polymer ink,” explained Dr. Li, the leading author of this work.

“However, these added particles often cause severe light scattering, which impacts printing precision.

It’s then much harder to create the microstructures of natural porous materials like rock. Another issue is that this composite material has poor light transparency, meaning seeing the fluid flow through the device is much more difficult.”

To overcome these issues, the KU researchers used an alternative to polymer ink: in-situ mineral growth in 3D-printed device.

“On complex surfaces, putting a thin layer of a mineral coating on the inner surface of the micromodel mimics the natural surface mineralogy, but can mean that the crystal growth isn’t uniform,” explained Dr. Li. “To overcome this, we coated a seed layer of calcite nanoparticles on the inner surface.

This facilitated calcite crystals to grow uniformly, resulting in a device that functioned precisely like carbonate rock. We made a ‘real’, yet transparent, rock.”

This device can then be used as a sort of ‘rock-on-a-chip’ to analyze how various fluids move through the pores and can be readily tailored to test, observe and analyze fluidics in biological, soft robotics, aerospace, and other emerging applications. This ‘rock-on-a-chip’ use has also been demonstrated by the team in another publication.

The transparent, 3D printed rock created at Khalifa University makes microfluidic technology more accessible to researchers in various fields and accelerates innovation.

It could also be used to gain key insights into how to extract more hydrocarbons from the UAE’s oil fields in a more sustainable and cost-effective way.

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The United Arab Emirates is not only in the path of locust swarms but is also a breeding site for the locusts.

“While scientific efforts started in the early 1900s to combat locust plagues, a lack of knowledge about the insect made it difficult,” explained Dr. Yates. “During the 1930s, great efforts were made to collect reliable information across the region, which allowed both the seasonal breeding areas and the paths of migrating swarms to be identified.”

The Anti-Locust Campaigns of the Second World War

The size and weight of a paper clip, a single locust hardly appears capable of the devastation and destruction associated with it. But a single locust isn’t the problem—swarms are.

In a paper published in the Emirates Natural History Group journal, Tribulus, Dr. Athol Yates, Assistant Professor at the Khalifa University Institute for International and Civil Security, described the little-known, large-scale anti-locust campaign in the Arabian Peninsula, which was a combined military and civilian effort.

“The desert locust is one of the most damaging pests to agriculture due to its ability to form huge swarms which devour everything in their paths,” explained Dr. Yates. “They have often caused devastation in the Arabian region, like in 1958 when they destroyed about 85 percent of crops in the then Trucial States.”

Plagues of locusts occur periodically, with most lasting for several years.

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There were multiple problems in how locust swarms were tackled prior to the campaigns led by the British military. As locust swarms occur in cycles of multiple years separated by an absence, countries only took action when they appeared, meaning responses were too late because little action was taken between these cycles to prevent reoccurrence. Since locusts cross international borders, countering them also requires coordinated action across countries.

However, most responses were isolated. On top of this, chemical poison was only introduced in the early 1940s, with methods to counter locusts before this only partially effective and often improvised.

“In 1942, the first effective chemical poison was used to control locust populations,” explained Dr. Yates.

“Sodium arsenate was mixed with wheat bran and laid in the path of the juvenile insects. Those that ate this preparation died, meaning they perished before becoming airborne and preventing further breeding.”

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During this time, the Trucial

In 1943, Britain formed the Middle East

to be in charge of the anti-locust

States were a British protected

Anti-Locust Unit (MEALU) and tasked

campaign across the region.

state, with the British promising

it with destroying locust swarms at

to protect the Trucial Coast from

the source. Its success hinged on

“Wilfred Thesiger, an English

external aggression, in exchange

coordination and input from other

explorer and travel writer, applied to

for the Rulers allowing Britain to

countries and large-scale logistics

work on locust research as he had a

act with foreign powers on their

assistance from the British military.

desire to explore the region. He was

behalf.

Such an undertaking was only feasible

tasked with gathering information

as a combined effort, with intense

on the environmental conditions

World War II started in 1939,

research and international conferences

with the Middle East a significant

of southern Arabia to see if they

needed to develop the plan for the

theater of operations in the early

were right for the development of

largest-ever coordinated operation

years because it allowed access

desert locust swarms. Thesiger’s

against locusts in the Middle East.

first journey began in October 1945

to Africa, the oil of the Gulf and launching of operations against

“Until the very early 1940s, anti-locust

the Axis powers (Germany, Italy,

measures concentrated on protecting

and Japan) in the Mediterranean.

crops. This defensive strategy meant

In 1941, locust swarms were

waiting until the locusts arrived near

reported in the Arabian Peninsula,

the crops and then attempting to

marking the start of seven years

destroy them,” explained Dr. Yates. “In

of locust plagues, threatening the

contrast, the MEALU approach involved

stability of the region.

sending scouting parties out into the desert, and when locusts were located,

“The locust threat presented the

sending workers to destroy them. This

British with unpalatable choices

required considerable planning and

between allowing the local

coordination so that the work was

population to starve or importing

continuous, efficient, and effective.”

and distributing large amounts

in Salalah, Oman. He explored the south-eastern edge of the Empty Quarter and the region around the intersection of modern-day Oman, Yemen and Saudi Arabia, recording information on locust breeding, seasonal rainfall and vegetation.”

During the 1950s and 1960s, Britain and Pakistan in particular supported anti-locust activities in the Trucial States. Now, pest control teams in the UAE are spearheaded by the Ministry of Climate Change and Environment.

of food,” explained Dr. Yates. “The

After 1944, the locust menace had

latter would have had significant

been significantly reduced, but the

military consequences as it

threat remained as the war raged on.

“The British military’s support for

would divert ships and manpower

Combatting locusts remained a high

the anti-locust campaign during

essential for military operations

priority but the military equipment

the Second World War rarely rates

in the region, while the former

and personnel were required in other

a footnote in the histories of the

would lead to civil disturbances

arenas and could no longer participate

Middle East,” said Dr. Yates. “This

that would also affect military

in the anti-locust campaigns in the

is unfortunate, for it overlooks

operations and undermine British

Middle East. Attention shifted in the

important contributions made by

prestige. In military terms,

immediate years after the war to

the military in those years, not only

combatting locusts was ‘regarded

more national-based efforts with less

to the health and livelihoods of the

as second only in importance to

cross-country coordination. There was

people of the Middle East, but also to

operations against the enemy.’”

particular reluctance for the British

winning World War II.” 99 KU TIMES

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Blockchain Could Provide Trust and Transparency in a DataDriven Pandemic

A collaborative research team from Khalifa University is contributing to the world’s efforts to combat the Covid-19 pandemic using blockchain technology to build a more trustworthy tracking system of reported data on the disease.

“The sudden development of the Covid-19 pandemic exposed the limitations in modern healthcare systems in handling public health emergencies,” explained Dr. Khaled Salah, Professor of Computer Engineering at Khalifa University. “It became clear that adopting innovative technologies such as blockchain can help make planning operations and deploying resources more effective.”

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Dr. Salah is the project’s principal investigator. He is joined

by Dr. Raja Jayaraman, Associate Professor of Industrial Engineering, Dounia Marbouh, Graduate Research and Teaching Assistant, Ilhaam Omar, Research Associate, Tayaba Abbasi, Graduate Research Assistant, Fatema Maasmi, and Mazin Debe, Research Associate, and Dr. Samer Ellahham, Staff Physician at Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi.

Decision-making should be based on facts, and the more accurate the information gathered, the sounder the decisions made, and the better the outcomes that can be achieved.

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, making decisions on public health has become more crucial than ever, with the transparency, traceability, and immutability of the data behind such decisions paramount.

“Blockchain technology can play an important role in the healthcare sector by reducing delays in regulatory approvals and streamlining the communication between diverse stakeholders in the supply chain,” explained Dr. Salah.

“But it can also ensure that information received by the public and government agencies is reliable and trustworthy.

The Covid-19 outbreak has seen a huge increase in the spread of misinformation and since existing platforms lack the ability to validate authenticity, there was a sense of public panic and irrational behavior. We think that using a blockchain-based system will ensure data integrity, security, transparency and traceability.”

Blockchain technology is a permanent record of transactions or exchanges and is shared among a network of computers, with users on the network adding to the record of transactions. Instead of a database that is centrally located that maintains and manages records, the Blockchain database is distributed through the network. Transactions are kept secure via cryptography and have to be approved and verified by the network. Each transaction can be thought of as a block, and the ledger that links them together is the chain. It is through this decentralization that blockchain offers transparency and security.

It is easy to see how this technology could be leveraged in the healthcare industry. All users of the network, including stakeholders, policy makers and healthcare professionals, can access the network, and all the pieces of information are verified and show the history of transactions.

“Every day, a new set of data points are reported concerning the number of positive and negative tests, patients hospitalized, hospital beds occupied, ventilator shortfalls, and more,” explained Dr. Salah.

“These numbers allow us to track the progress of Covid-19 in real-time and as they become available, making it a data-driven pandemic. However, the data available is susceptible to data manipulation.

A technology with impenetrable information infrastructure, transparency and cryptographic encryption tools could help combat the crisis: Blockchain.”

Using blockchain could improve mobile health applications, monitoring devices, sharing and storing of electronic medical records, and clinical trial data.

Instead of relying on health information exchanges or other ways of aggregating data, stakeholders can access patient databases on a large population scale, which is vital for public health policy decision makers.

“Blockchain technology could be used to simplify the clinical trial processes for vaccines and drugs, raise public awareness, transparently track donations and fundraising activities, and act as a reliable public health data tracker,” said Dr. Salah.

“We wanted to look at the data tracker application, as decisions made based on data are only as good as the data they use. Building a decentralized tracking system that retrieves publicly available information and data from authoritative sources to display on decentralized applications and dashboards is vital as this platform imposes security restrictions and data privacy.

“Our blockchain-based tracking system promotes trust, transparency, and traceability, and streamlines communication between stakeholders in the network.

Moreover, the data tracking system ensures data immutability and security, while simultaneously collecting data from trusted sources. Integrating blockchain technology in tracking solutions increases the reliability of trusted sources and enables public and healthcare officials to make sound judgements based on the latest accurate data feeds available in the distributed network.”

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MBZIRC Inspiring Solutions To Important Robotics Challenges with Special Journal Edition The dust may have settled in the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC) arena but the ingenuity and ambition demonstrated by the teams competing continues. Efforts are now being directed towards further research and development discussions as insights related to the 2020 challenges are prepared for publication in an upcoming special edition of the Journal of Field Robotics.

The Journal of Field Robotics special issue MBZIRC 2020 – Challenges in Autonomous Field Robotics – will be published in early 2021 and researchers involved in MBZIRC 2020 are encouraged to submit their work. Topics of interest include robotics in unstructured, dynamic environments, sensing and perception, machine learning, mechanical design, computer architectures, communication, planning, learning, and control.

“Robotics has the potential to have an impact that is as transformative as the Internet, with robotics technology poised to fuel a broad range of next-generation products and applications in a diverse array of fields,” explained Dr. Lakmal Seneviratne, Director of the Khalifa University Center for Autonomous Robotic Systems (KUCARS).

“These include robot applications in disaster response, manufacturing, construction, healthcare and household chores. In the past few decades, robotic competitions have been a catalyst for accelerating technological advancements in robotics and autonomous systems.”

MBZIRC is a biennial robotics competition motivated by the technological challenges facing the next generation of robotics. Similar to other major competitions, MBZIRC 2020 provided an environment to foster innovation and technical excellence, while encouraging entertaining performance.

Robots and drones indeed have a bright future across multiple fields. They may be useful and entertaining to the hobbyist, but the recent MBZIRC hosted in Abu Dhabi proved their incredible potential in a broad range of diverse applications. But for autonomous robots and drones to be useful in tasks such as disaster zones or as first

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responders, they need to be able to move fast, far and without human oversight, often in environments where they can’t rely on external guidance systems like GPS. All the MBZIRC 2020 challenges were developed to push the technological and application boundaries in robotics, focusing on fast, autonomous navigation in complex environments to complete a task. While remote controlled robots and drones would face enough challenge in this arena, the most important part of MBZIRC is the autonomous completion of tasks. This autonomy is one of the biggest challenges facing robotics development.

“The enabling technologies for next generation robotic applications include robots working more autonomously in dynamic, unstructured environments, while collaborating and interacting with other robots and humans,” explained Dr. Seneviratne. “MBZIRC 2020 focused on some of these enabling technologies, by providing a demanding set of benchmark robotics challenges, and attracted some of the best international teams.”

While solving real world problems, MBZIRC encourages innovation in robotics, AI, and materials; all major components that must be addressed as robots and drones can become increasingly potent tools to improve safety and security. Robotics competitions are the ultimate catalyst to accelerating development as teams compete to push the boundaries.

The challenges and innovations required to compete have attracted the attention of the prestigious Journal of Field Robotics, highlighting the impact MBZIRC has on inspiring solutions to some of the most pressing challenges in robotics.

INNOVATION FORWARD

On the Edge of Smart and Secure Driverless Cars With companies around the world in the race to put the first truly driverless cars on the road, one of the first steps is empowering these vehicles with the ability to communicate and interact with each other. Much like the Internet-ofThings, where intelligent and connected devices exist on a network, the Internet-of-Vehicles allows vehicles to exchange information, efficiently and safely with each other, as well as with infrastructure in smart cities.

The Internet-of-Vehicles (IoV) is a network of cars communicating with each other and the systems in place around them, creating a network with intelligent devices as participants.

A multidisciplinary research team, including Dr. Hadi Otrok and Dr. Rabeb Mizouni, Associate Professors in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has investigated the use of machine learning and blockchain in IoV. However, such integration has its challenges, with the research team suggesting the use of a new Vehicular Edge Computing-based architecture to embed both technologies.

“The number of smart vehicles in IoV is going to increase drastically in the coming years,” said Dr. Otrok. “Therefore, careful consideration must be taken to manage the IoV infrastructure efficiently.”

This new generation of vehicles use complex applications that require intelligent decision making, which in turn require a lot of computing power. Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC) can meet this demand for computation, using computation devices on the roadside or in proximity to the vehicles.

The increase in Internet-of-Things devices at the edge of the network—physically distanced from the processing and computing data centers of the network—produces a massive amount of data to be computed at data centers, potentially pushing network bandwidth requirements to the limit. These data centers may not be able to guarantee the required transfer rates or response times that are critical in the realtime computing needed for smart vehicles to navigate, for example.

Additionally, devices at the edge constantly consume data coming from the cloud. Moving computation away from data centers towards the edge of the network, where the vehicles are, uses computation devices to perform tasks and provide services on behalf of the cloud.

This architecture facilitates communication, computation and data sharing among vehicles, which is more convenient

for dynamic environments. Machine learning techniques can then be used to optimally decide and schedule tasks that need to be offloaded to the VEC infrastructure and thus support network management.

At the same time, more automated vehicles means more data that needs to be protected. This is where blockchain could help.

Blockchain is a decentralized and distributed ledger of transactions: no single authority or company owns the data as all data is stored in a decentralized way. Because transactions are recorded in secure blocks on the blockchain, they can always be viewed, but it are nearly impossible to alter. This immutability eliminates the need for a central intermediary.

“Blockchain’s decentralized and security-enhancing architecture offers the trustworthiness needed to make this work,” said Dr. Mizouni. “But using both machine learning techniques and blockchain exhausts the infrastructure, consuming the computation resources needed for the smart vehicles to function. Using a multilayered hybrid blockchain-based VEC architecture can overcome this issue.”

The architecture proposed by the research team supposes that vehicles on the road are always connected to the network edge.

The data they generate from their sensors is sent to a road-side unit (RSU) where it is stored, filtered and transferred securely using a blockchain for anonymity and data protection. In this way, data generated by the cars is sent securely to powerful servers for processing, where the computation tasks are executed.

“Vehicles are becoming smarter, but such intelligence comes at the cost of needing complex computation,” explained Dr. Otrok.

“Even though smart vehicles nowadays are embedded with strong computation resources, these might not be enough to meet all the complex applications that are becoming necessary. This is where offloading the problems to the Vehicular Edge can help advance the field.”

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Shrinking Images for Efficient Transfer and Storage with Memristors KU TIMES 104

A TEAM OF RESEARCHERS FROM KHALIFA UNIVERSITY HAS INVESTIGATED A MEMRISTOR-BASED IMAGE COMPRESSION ARCHITECTURE TO SPEED UP IMAGE COMPRESSION WHILE ALSO MAKING THE DEVICES USING THIS TECHNOLOGY MUCH SMALLER AND MORE ENERGY EFFICIENT.

INNOVATION FORWARD

In the time of unlimited data phone plans, it’s easy to forget that we were once constrained by how much data we could consume or produce. According to Domo’s Data Never Sleeps 8.0 report, it is estimated that every minute around 350k stories and 150k photos are posted on Instagram and Facebook. Moreover, Zoom hosts around 208,333 meeting participants in.

“This huge amount of generated data needs to be processed at a fast rate using complex algorithms to interpret the information,” explained Dr. Halawani. “This is computationally demanding, but Internet-of-Things devices tend to be energy-constrained and have limited resources, so innovative architectures and technologies that enable efficient computation are needed.”

These days, sending pictures of anything and everything is almost instantaneous and we rarely spare a thought for just how much power it takes to send them.

Conventional computing faces serious challenges in overcoming these constraints.

Part of this stems from mobile phone operating systems using image compression technologies, such as HEIF (highefficiency image format). However, image compression needs even more research attention when it comes to sending images in urgent situations, such as in smart healthcare, or from the furthest corners of our universe as we explore new worlds via satellites. Reducing the image data size will reduce its storage requirements and the energy and time required to send it via low-bandwidth communication and/or critical communication channels.

A team of researchers from Khalifa University has investigated a memristor-based image compression architecture to speed up image compression while also making the devices using this technology much smaller and more energy efficient.

The team comprised Dr. Yasmin Halawani, Post-doctoral Researcher, Dr. Baker Mohammad, Associate Professor, Dr. Mahmoud Al-Qutayri, Professor, all from the System on Chip Center and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Khalifa University, and Dr. Said Al-Sarawi from the Center for Biomedical Engineering at the University of Adelaide, Australia.

Dr. Halawani explained in her doctoral thesis that today’s devices are “jam-packed with a variety of sensors, which are collectively expected to generate more than 40 zettabytes in 2020.” That’s one billion terabytes of data or one trillion gigabytes.

“At the device level, technologies are fast approaching their physical and power limits, while at the architectural level, there are limits to computing throughput that we have yet to solve,” explained Dr. Halawani.

A wide range of emerging memory technologies has been investigated to address these challenges, including resistive random access memory (ReRAM), which is a promising technology for building efficient in-memory computing (IMC) architectures, thanks to its ability to perform both storage and computation in the same physical device.

One such ReRAM device is the memristor. A memristor device consists of metal oxide sandwiched between two electrodes. It has the ability to change its resistance state under the application of suitable voltage. As the name implies, the memristor can remember its last written state, even if power is turned off, which offers great potential for use as a solid-state computer memory device.

Unlike traditional solid-state storage technologies, memristors require less energy to operate, last longer, and store at least twice as much data. They use braininspired architectures that allow them to perform inmemory computing. This solves a big issue in traditional computer architectures, referred to as the memory wall, by eliminating the need to move data from memory to the processing unit in order to perform computing functions.

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Much as data compression is the process of modifying, encoding or converting the bits of data in such a way that it consumes less space on a disk, image compression is the “art of removing redundant data for efficient storage and transmission of information,” according to Dr. Halawani.

“The compression is achieved by reducing the correlation between neighboring pixels, spectral bands, or different frames in a video.

This process is computationally intensive as it involves many matrix manipulation operations and can result in either lossy or lossless Figure: The difference between lossless and lossy image compression

compression that trades off image quality for a higher compression ratio.”

Memristors employ a crossbar architecture, which involves multiple

As memristors form a potential building block

inputs connected to multiple outputs in a matrix design. This design

for in-memory computing, their arrangement

can speed up the multiply and add operations found in many digital

in a crossbar could mean devices can be made

signal processing algorithms in a smaller device using less power.

as much as 154 times smaller compared to previous technologies, while offering double

“When these ReRAM devices are built in a crossbar architecture, they

the energy savings. The team’s proposed

can offer significant savings in energy, area and execution time,” said

architecture involves a single computational

Dr. Halawani. “Plus, the low power requirement makes them an ideal

crossbar to perform the compression task.

candidate for resource-constrained Internet-of-Things applications.”

They focused on image compression during All very helpful for the mobile devices that are part of the Internet-of-

the image capture phase, with their system

Things, especially so given the zettabytes of data to be processed that

delivering a high image quality and a high

are multimedia in nature, which is both computationally and energy

processing rate, while reducing storage needs.

demanding.

Their success has led to the issue of a patent “Image exchange in the Internet-of-Things is essential in various

for their technology, with the architecture

applications, including smart healthcare, smart structures monitoring

offering huge potential in Internet-of-Things

and transportation,” explained Dr. Halawani. “Although there are

devices, ranging from cameras in the everyday

compression algorithms to help reduce storage area requirements

smartphone to the highly sophisticated imaging

and data transmissions between the devices, they are computationally

devices used in healthcare, and even space

intensive. Our research uses analog, in-memory computing for image

exploration, to send images of the cosmos back

compression utilizing emerging RRAM technology.”

to Earth.

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INNOVATION FORWARD

Khalifa University Researchers Produce High Refractive Index Materials Using Sulphur

SULPHUR-RICH COMPOSITE POLYMERS DEVELOPED AT KHALIFA UNIVERSITY COULD BE USED TO MAKE HIGH REFRACTIVE INDEX MATERIALS, WHICH ARE PARTICULARLY SOUGHT FOR APPLICATIONS REQUIRING HIGH TRANSMISSION OF LIGHT.

A team of researchers at Khalifa University has discovered a way to use elemental sulphur to enhance the refractive index of polymer materials.

The refractive index, which is the measure of how fast light moves through a material, is an important optical property. It determines the focusing power of lenses, the dispersive power of prisms, the reflectivity of lens coatings, and the light-guiding nature of optical fibers. High refractive index materials are particularly sought for applications requiring high transmission of light.

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Inorganic materials—chemical compounds that contain no

Previous research has focused on using inorganic or metal

carbon-hydrogen bonds—usually possess a high refractive

nanoparticles to produce polymer composites with a high

index, but their lower flexibility and high densities can

refractive index, but manufacturing these is more difficult, and

limit their applications. Polymeric materials, or plastics,

the dispersion of the nanoparticles in the polymer matrix is

overcome these issues with low weight, excellent impact

inconsistent, impacting the transparency of the materials and

resistance, easy processability and low cost, but their

limiting their applications.

refractive index is Elemental sulphur is a national resource for the UAE, with A team of researchers including Dr. Vijay Wadi,

production coming from the refining and processing of oil

Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Kishore Jena, Research Scientist,

and gas. Sulphur atoms can increase the refractive indices of

Kevin Halique, Research Assistant, and Dr. Saeed

materials. The amount of sulphur and the degree of molecular

Alhassan, Associate Professor and Acting Senior Director

packing in the polymers play an important role in controlling

of the Petroleum Institute, all from the Department of

the refractive properties.

Chemical Engineering at Khalifa University, has discovered a way to use elemental sulphur to enhance the refractive

However, elemental sulphur is difficult to incorporate

index of polymer materials. Their findings were published

into polymers on its own due to its low solubility and

in a paper in Scientific Reports.

incompatibility with the majority of organic chemicals.

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INNOVATION FORWARD

Additionally, the resultant polymers produced with

are synthesized with no solvent as sulphur itself acts

heat treatment are highly brittle and unstable at room

as a solvent, making the process highly scalable at the

temperature, making them less than effective for use

industrial level. The sulphur-rich composite polymers

during polymer processing.

made using this technique are characterized by a high refractive index, and the optical properties can be tuned

Dr. Alhassan and the research team made stable

by simply modifying the chemical formulation.

polymers by reacting elemental sulphur with 1,3-diisopropenylbenzene (DIB) cross-linker inside a

“The main advantage of these composites is their ability

polystyrene matrix where it diffuses into the matrix,

to be scaled up and processed into a variety of different

ensuring even dispersion of the sulphur. The refractive

objects,” explained Dr. Alhassan. “Molded objects and

index of the final polymer can be tuned as needed by

films made using these composites are transparent

varying the amount of cross-linkers.

and uniformly colored, showing the stability of the composites. They can be processed into any shape and

“Directly using elemental sulphur to produce high

size without altering transparency. Plus, since they are

refractive index polymers is limited by sulphur’s low

highly soluble in most organic solvents, they can be

solubility in most organic solvents and chemicals,”

made into ultra-thin films that are clear and stable.”

explained Dr. Alhassan. “However, the inverse vulcanization technique is one way to overcome this.”

This manufacturing method means high refractive index composite materials can be produced at low

Inverse vulcanization is a process where sulphur reacts

cost and high scale, using an easily obtained waste

with unsaturated hydrocarbons to form polymers with

product from the UAE’s petroleum industry for myriad

linear sulphur in their molecular structures. The polymers

applications in various fields.

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INNOVATION FORWARD

Khalifa University Research Team Investigates the Future of Stem Cell Therapies

Researchers hope stem cells will one day be effective in treating many medical conditions and diseases for which few treatments exist given that stem cells offer the potential to repair, restore, replace and regenerate cells.

Despite the successes seen so far, there are several major challenges that must be addressed before stem cells can be used as cell therapies to treat a wider range of diseases. One of these challenges, investigated by a team from Khalifa University, is the pathway by which stem cells self-renew or differentiate.

In a review paper recently published in Stem Cells, Dr. Abdulrahim Sajini, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, along with Dr. James McElhinney, Post-Doctoral Fellow, and Dr. Ayesha Hasan, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, cover exciting insights into how small modifications to gene expression controls can influence this pathway.

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Stem cells are the foundation for every organ and tissue in the body. All stem cells can self-renew, dividing indefinitely to produce more of the same stem cell, or differentiate, developing into specialized cells.

“The unique properties of stem cells make them well suited for regenerative medicine,” explained Dr. Sajini. “Stem cell therapies have shown considerable promise in the treatment of a diverse variety of medical issues, including regrowth of cartilage for osteoarthritis, pancreatic beta cell regeneration for diabetes and neural stem cell transplant for spinal cord injury.”

INNOVATION FORWARD

Before stem cells can be used more extensively

an expanding set of ncRNAs in regulating cell biology.

in regenerative medicine, they need more study.

Moreover, these RNAs have been found to be extensively

Researchers need to first learn more about how stem

decorated with chemical modifications that comprise

cells behave and how they generate different types of

a complex regulatory layer on their functionality. As a

human cells. The KU team reviewed the different types

fundamental governor of cell behavior, elucidating the

of stem cells and the unique epitranscriptome roles

epitranscriptome would represent a significant step

associated with them.

forward to addressing challenges faced by stem cell therapies.”

RNA is responsible for coding, decoding, regulating and expressing genes held within our DNA. Recently RNA was

There are many challenges associated with stem cell

found to interact with various modifiers within our cells

therapies. For example, the embryonic stem cells available

that can affect whether a gene is expressed or not. This is known as the ‘epitranscriptome’, which can be thought of as an extra layer of instructions for the RNA similar to epigenetics in DNA. There are different types of stem cells, found during embryonic or adult development, with slightly different properties. Embryonic stem cells are the most pluripotent, meaning they can develop into any cell making up the body, which makes sense as all humans begin as embryos. However, this pluripotency requires multi-layer regulation check points, with the epitranscriptome playing a crucial role in maintaining the plasticity required for embryonic stem cells to selfrenew or differentiate. In contrast, germline stem cells are unipotent cells that only give rise to haploid gamete cells.

today are likely to be rejected by the body; adult stem cells on the other hand are difficult to grow in the lab and can only be found in small quantities in their niche.

Currently, the only established therapy using stem cells is hematopoietic stem cell transplants to treat people with conditions such as leukemia and lymphoma—a bone marrow transplantation in most cases as hematopoietic stem cells are those responsible for making blood cells.

One important challenge is deciphering the imbalances in homeostasis that result in the development of cancer stem cells. Some stem cells form tumors after transplantation as pluripotency is linked to tumor formation. Recently, the epitranscriptome has emerged as a major regulator of stem cell biology and the KU team predicts that small ncRNA modifications will play a key part in future stem cell therapies.

“Stem cells are unique cells that have an inherent ability

“Most often, the onset of cancer appears linked to

to self-renew or differentiate,” explained Dr. McElhinney.

dysregulation in gene profiles,” explained Dr. Al Marzooqi.

“Both fate decisions are strongly regulated at the

“There, the epitranscriptome of small ncRNAs is being

molecular level via intricate signalling pathways. These

directly implicated in the development of tumors by

pathways were thought to be governed by the action of

regulating the transcriptome of cancer stem cells. These

transcription factors but now, small non-coding RNAs

small ncRNAs are being recognized for their potential

(ncRNAs) and their post-transcriptional modifications

to serve as biomarkers with diagnostic potential but the

have emerged as additional regulatory layers with

translation of these potential benefits to clinical applications

essential roles in this process.”

is an ongoing effort. There’s no doubt that understanding how these small ncRNAs impact oncogenesis will help to

“Research into the epitranscriptome signatures in

identify how cancer develops and lead to more personalised

stem cells has revealed the emerging importance of

approaches in its treatment.”

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Overcoming Water Scarcity with Nanotechnology at Khalifa University

TO COMBAT THE THREAT OF WATER SCARCITY IN THE MIDDLE EAST, A TEAM OF RESEARCHERS LED BY DR. LOURDES VEGA HAS INVESTIGATED NANOTECHNOLOGY FOR WATER TREATMENT AND DESALINATION PURPOSES.

The ten countries most threatened by water scarcity are concentrated in the Middle East, including the United Arab Emirates. To overcome the lack of sufficient fresh water, much of the water provided to the population is desalinated, with salt water treated to remove the salt and other impurities. This usually involves polymer-based membranes through which the water is run to catch the contaminants, but this isn’t the most efficient process and requires a lot of energy.

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INNOVATION FORWARD

A team of researchers led by Dr. Lourdes Vega, Professor of Chemical Engineering at Khalifa University and Director of the Research and Innovation Center on CO2 and H2 (RICH) and Dr. Daniel Bahamon, Research Scientist at the RICH Center, and Dr. Euon Seon Cho, Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at KAIST, has investigated nanotechnology for water treatment purposes. They developed a graphene-based nanostructured membrane and analyzed its ability to allow water to permeate through and trap dissolved particles to efficiently clean the water.

procedure for water purification and desalination), it is difficult to keep the interaction between these cations and the GO layers stable.

“Due to rapid population growth and climate change, the demand for fresh and clean water has increased over time,” explained Prof. Vega. “However, fresh and clean water is easily contaminated by industrial development and human activities, so we need a method to keep our water resources clean. One such method is membrane filtration, which separates contaminants and salts from water in an energy efficient manner. Various types of membrane materials have been widely studied for this, but due to the poor mechanical and chemical stability of polymers, such membranes are unsuitable to large-scale cleaning processes. To find an alternative solution, we investigated graphene-based membranes, in particular, graphene oxide (GO) membranes.”

Crown ether molecules are chemical compounds that form a ring containing several ether groups. The research team prepared the GO membrane with potassium ions and crown ethers to create a nanochannel complex that was partially narrowed compared to the pristine GO membrane. This subnanochannel has an important role in blocking the permeation of ions during pressure-assisted filtration.

Graphene and its derivatives are emerging candidates for efficient water filtration membranes due to their unique nanochannel network, which allows water to permeate through but block unwanted solutes, as well as their robust chemical and physical stability. However, it is difficult to maintain their performance over time, which makes maintaining the fine nanochannels and designing the channels more carefully crucial to their longevity.

Over prolonged use, these nanochannels become blocked as the membrane swells. Research has shown that different positively charged ions (cations) can be used to manipulate the spacing between the molecules in the nanosheets, creating larger channels for filtration, but during pressure-assisted filtration (an indispensable

“We needed to employ an additional molecule to tightly hold the interspersed cations between the GO sheets during the filtration process,” explained Prof. Vega. “We know that crown ether molecules can selectively bind to cations depending on their cavity size and composition so we used a controlled amount of these in our graphene-oxide composite membranes.”

The team found that the complex of crown ethers and potassium ions plays a key role in tailoring the nanochannels, implying that the approach can be further tailored by varying the concentration and type of inserted crown ether molecules and cations. Additionally, the mixed salt solution used in testing was beneficial to maintaining the crown ether complex structure, which is important for real seawater applications.

“Water is the ultimate systems challenge,” said Prof.

Vega. “It is a unique resource that underpins all drivers of growth—from agricultural production to energy generation, industry, and manufacturing. It also connects these sectors into a broader economic system that must balance social development and environmental interests.

“The joint effort between the team at Khalifa University and KAIST led to the fabrication and testing of the membranes at the lab scale as well as the understanding of their performance through molecular simulations. Our next steps will involve research into its stability and the potential for scaling-up production as well as other membranes based on graphene oxide for water treatment.”

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Removing Toxic Herbicides from Water Using New Synthesized Porous Polymers

REMOVING PARAQUAT FROM AGRICULTURAL WASTEWATER IS CRUCIAL TO PROTECTING THE ENVIRONMENT AND HUMAN HEALTH BUT CONVENTIONAL MATERIALS TO DO SO ARE SLOW-ACTING AND NOT REUSABLE. DR. DINESH SHETTY AT KU HAS DEVELOPED A NOVEL POLYMER TO ADSORB PARAQUAT MUCH MORE EFFICIENTLY.

Water quality is influenced by many natural factors but the greatest threat comes from human activity. Mining, urban development, and agriculture are among the biggest culprits, introducing pollutants into the waterways from various processes. If they enter drinking water sources, they can pose a significant threat to human health.

Paraquat is a toxic chemical that is widely used as a herbicide to control unwanted weeds and grasses that grow alongside crops. Paraquat is quick-acting and nonKU TIMES 114

INNOVATION FORWARD

selective, and dangerous to humans, having been banned in several countries due to its neurodegenerative effects and toxicity. Despite this, it is still one of the most commonly used herbicides worldwide.

As world population rises, the use of pesticides and herbicides for crop protection is expected to increase.

Because intensive farming methods continue to rely heavily on chemicals, the levels of persistent herbicides and pesticides prevalent in the environment will remain at dangerous levels.

Removing paraquat from agricultural wastewater is therefore crucial to protecting the environment and human health, while also supporting food security. Conventional efforts to filter out paraquat rely on materials made from clays, silica, resins and hybrid materials. However, these materials are slow-acting and not easily reusable,

a polycalixarene has a three-dimensional porous structure that is totally insoluble in water but selectively extracts toxic paraquat molecules. This unique quality allowed the researchers to utilize different analogs of calixarenes with increasing cavity sizes. The larger the cavity size, the more strongly the paraquat can bind to the cavity and eventually be removed. Importantly, the polymers can be easily reused by simple washing methods and still outperform commercial activated carbon currently in use.

“Because of the selective host-guest chemistry these calixarene molecules offer, they can form complexes with paraquat in water,” explained Dr. Shetty. “They outperformed not only other organic polymers, but also the activated carbon, zeolites, and various types of clay that have been used previously. They are also easy to recycle, meaning we can use our polymers repeatedly without a significant loss in adsorption efficiency.”

prompting research into new materials.

Now, Dr. Dinesh Shetty, Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Khalifa University, along with the Trabolsi research group at New York University Abu Dhabi, has developed a novel polymer that can adsorb paraquat from water more efficiently than traditional materials.

The researchers developed polycalixarenes, with multi-ring (or macrocycle) molecules that have hydrophobic cavities – areas that repel water – that can hold smaller molecules or ions. These polycalixarenes act as the adsorbants as

Dr. Shetty has also applied this technology to removing other toxic substances from water, including perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA). PFOA is another nonbiodegradable and persistent pollutant which can accumulate in water resources and pose serious environmental issues in many parts of the world.

Dr. Shetty is a member of the Khalifa University Center for Catalysis and Separation (CeCaS), one of KU’s 18 specialized research centers. CeCaS research aims at developing practical solutions to chemical engineering challenges faced by a number of industries today.

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College of Arts & Science College of Arts & Science

LEADER IN LEADER IN RESEARCH RESEARCH

College of Medicine & Health CollegeScience of Medicine & Health Science

The highly-ranked Khalifa University offers fully accredited degrees to all nationalities through its 3 academic colleges, 13 bachelor’s, 16 master’s and 2 PhD programs, offering plenty of opportunities for students to explore theirdegrees intereststoand learn from The highly-ranked Khalifa University offers fully accredited all nationalities award-winning teachers. through its 3 academic colleges, 13 bachelor’s, 16 master’s and 2 PhD programs, offering plenty of opportunities for students to explore their interests and learn from As Abu Dhabi’s research-intensive university, Khalifa University gives students a award-winning teachers. chance to study in-depth with expert faculty and researchers on the leading-edge of discovery in science, engineering, and medicine to solve real-world problems.

As Abu Dhabi’s research-intensive university, Khalifa University gives students Our a students develop cleaner energy,faculty find new to produce sustainably,of chance tohelp study in-depth with expert andways researchers on water the leading-edge create smarter diagnostic tools, and better waysreal-world to use AI to make data discovery in science, engineering, anddiscover medicine to solve problems.

Our insightful. students help develop cleaner energy, find new ways to produce water sustainably, create smarter diagnostic tools, and discover better ways to use AI to make data Study beside our award-winning faculty and help deliver real solutions, transform insightful. lives, and change the world.

Study beside our award-winning faculty and help deliver real solutions, transform lives, and change the world.

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