Nine KAUST faculty members were recognized on the influential Clarivate Analytics 2018 Highly Cited Researchers list. Produced annually, the list recognizes leading researchers in science and social science at institutions around the world, and inclusion on the list indicates the high value and respect of the researcher's work.

CBRC would like to congratulate alumna Ghofran Othoum for receiving a Dh33,360 ($9,082) L'Oréal-Unesco 'For Women In Science Middle East' Fellowship for her work on sequencing Red Sea strains. She was one of five female scientists from four Gulf countries who received the grant and the only awardee in the Ph.D. student category.

Xiangliang Zhang, associate professor of computer science in the University's Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Science and Engineering division, recently gave an invited Early Career Spotlight Talk at the 27th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 23rd European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-ECAI-18) 2018. During the event—which was held in Stockholm, Sweden, from July 13 to 19—Zhang and 21 international peers presented on all areas of artificial intelligence (AI).

A group of students from Alfaisal University's College of Science visited the CBRC labs on November 22, 2018. The students, who are mostly majoring in biological and life sciences, were introduced to the Structural Biology and Engineering Lab, Comparative Genomics and Genetics Lab, as well as the Microbial Technology Group Lab. 

Sara Althubaiti, a student under the supervision of Assistant Professor Robert Hoehndorf, defended her Master's thesis on November 5, 2018.

Azza Althagafi, a student under the supervision of Assistant Professor Robert Hoehndorf, defended her Master's thesis on November 1, 2018.

Meshari Alazmi, a Ph.D. candidate under the supervision of Associate Professor Xin Gao, defended his Ph.D. dissertation on October 24, 2018.

We would like to thank administrative assistant Hanouf Al Hattan for all her hard work as she leaves CBRC to work on another assignment in KAUST.

Mona Alshahrani, a Ph.D. candidate under the supervision of Assistant Professor Robert Hoehndorf, defended her thesis proposal on October 10, 2018.

Xin Gao’s research is building bridges between computer science and biology.

Representatives from the KAUST Computational Bioscience Research Center (CBRC), King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), King Saud University (KSU), Taibah University, National Guard Health Affairs (NGHA) and the Saudi Arabia Ministry of Health (MOH) met on October 1 to iron out details of a national initiative to fight infectious diseases.

Working in one of the largest companies in the world is a dream come true for many. For Majed Alzahrani, a former Ph.D. student who worked under the supervision of Associate Professor Xin Gao, things couldn't be better. After graduating in 2017, he quickly joined Saudi Aramco as a data scientist in its Drilling Data Science unit.

While drones scan beaches to assess plastic litter, microplastics are found in the digestive tracts of one in every six Red Sea fish.

The European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB) is one of the most important conferences in the field of bioinformatics and computational biology.  Held in a different European city annually, this year's conference will take place in the historic city of Athens, Greece on September 8-12, 2018.