KAUST alumna Shamael Al-Shuhail won the prestigious Abu Dhabi International Exhibition & Conference (ADIPEC) Young Engineer of the Year Award at ADIPEC 2018 held in Abu Dhabi, UAE. The event, which was hosted by the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company from November 12 to 15, 2018, provided an opportunity for those in the oil and gas industry to come together to learn about new technologies, share information and to discuss the future of the hydrocarbon industry.
Al-Shuhail graduated from KAUST with a master's degree in electrical engineering in 2015. She won the award based on her ability to become a significant contributor to the future of the oil and gas industry and because of her potential to reach a senior management level in her profession.
"Winning the award is a great honor. The ADIPEC awards are among the most prestigious in the region, and just to be a finalist is a great honor," she said. "The awards open up many opportunities, and the Young ADIPEC Engineer of the Year award encourages us to reach our potential and to set higher goals for ourselves."
Early days in east Texas
Growing up in College Station in eastern Texas, the Saudi native was influenced to pursue her current career thanks to the abundance of fellow petroleum engineers and researchers living in the area.
"College Station is where my passion for engineering and research first started. This passion followed me during my move back to Saudi Arabia and up to this day. After completing high school, I decided on computer engineering as my university major [because of] its practicality [and its combination of] both math and physics, my two favorite subjects in high school," Al-Shuhail noted.
KAUST alumna Shamael Al-Shuhail is shown here winning the Abu Dhabi International Exhibition & Conference Young Engineer of the Year Award in late 2018. Image courtesy of Shamael Al-Shuhail.
Upon graduating with a bachelor's degree in computer engineering from Prince Mohammad bin Fahd University in 2013, Al-Shuhail saw KAUST as the ideal place to continue developing her technical research skills.
"I was accepted in the highly selective KAUST graduate scholarship program. There, I shifted my major to electrical engineering [and] more specifically signal processing. I wanted to widen my knowledge base so that it [would be] applicable to many industries—especially the oil and gas industry," she explained.
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