“I really try to put all of my efforts into helping and supporting the students. I feel like I’m responsible as a national myself to help my students.

“I always tell them, ‘I’m your eldest sister.’ So I really want them to feel that they are heard, supported. They can really lean into somebody who has been in their shoes once,” she says.
“I believe that one day they will also be responsible for my kids, either as a manager, as a teacher, as a professor,” she adds. “So trying to give them the best I can is the thing that I strive to do every day. And it’s the challenge that makes me wake up every day and try to improve myself.”

If you ask Al Kindi, she might say the problem she’s trying to solve isn’t really a problem. It’s an opportunity.

“It’s not in my KPI, but I’m trying to make the link between our students, graduates and industry partners very easy. One of my ambitions is to develop a platform that will make this connection very easy, not like the similar platforms where employers come, post their opportunities and our students apply, because this is what we have currently. But I want to build a platform where all our students and the graduates are there.

“I can show their skills, their talents, their achievements, their projects, how great they are with a full profile accessible by our industrial partners,” she says.

Ghadeer Mubarak, who is part of the faculty at KU’s Chemical and Petroleum Engineering Department and works with the Emirates Nuclear Technology Center, is a true product of Khalifa University.

She earned her bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. degrees at KU and is on the national faculty track to become an assistant professor in two years. She’s now packing her bags for a post-doctorate stint in Vancouver, Canada.

All of this on top of a major personal transition coming up soon.

“I’m currently trying to balance my work life and my new life,” she says.

Halima AlNaqbi is a researcher and a mentor.

She studies genomics and multiomics – looking at multiple molecular layers to get a better picture of cell function, health and disease – in her work with cancer and autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis.

She also chairs the Women in STEM group at Khalifa University, which mentors undergraduate and postgraduate students.

Hamda Almentheri has a lot of balls in the air. She just began her master’s program in engineering systems and management at KU, runs two businesses and is about to start a new job.

One of her businesses, partnered with her mother, sells tea. The other is a social-networking platform called For the Girls, which hosts workshops and other events to give women a fun and safe space to make new friends.

Almentheri also studied as an undergrad at KU. “I graduated as a computer engineer, which was very helpful. It was a balance of hardware, software and all that. But then I was like, wait, maybe I want to know the bigger picture of how everything works together. So that’s how I applied for engineering systems and management,” she says.

The KU researcher studies deep time – that’s hundreds of millions of years – in climate and environmental change to better understand times in the Earth’s history when the atmosphere experienced natural increases in carbon dioxide. Her work focuses on the impacts that CO2 had on the environment and how long it took the planet to recover. That’s why she was in Greenland: The island itself is a physical record of ancient atmospheres, temperatures and ice-sheet stability preserved in ice and sub-glacial bedrock.

“I am currently working on reconstruction of a time in Earth history when we had very high sea levels similar to what we might experience if the polar ice caps keep melting due to human-induced climate warming,” she says. “We are trying to understand the Earth’s response and the impact on natural systems.