Taous-Meriem Laleg-Kirati, KAUST associate professor of electrical engineering in the University's Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Science and Engineering Division, was selected as one of three finalists in the academic of distinction category at the recent Leadership Excellence for Women Awards & Symposium (LEWAS) in Bahrain. 
Women in Data Science (WiDS) is like the Global Women's March for analytics; it's a phenomenon too big for just one city. WiDS is the largest data science conference on Earth—taking place in over 50 countries, it has attained more than 100,000 attendees and is tagged as a global movement. The annual conference aims to inspire and educate data scientists worldwide—regardless of gender—and support women in the field. This year's WiDS conference was held at Stanford University with more than 100 regional institutions all over the world participating, including KAUST.
An accurate mathematical model is proposed to describe an emerging desalination technology called direct contact membrane distillation system. The mathematical model is important for designing efficient control and monitoring strategies, a crucial step to facilitate the commercialization of this technology.
A new algorithm is proposed to estimate the average velocity, dispersion coefficient, and differentiation order of a space-fractional advection-dispersion equation used for modeling contaminant transport in porous media. This allows for the characterization of the medium and the determination of the contaminant source. The algorithm is efficient, robust and fast.