Profiles

Dr. Nasir Alfaraj is a KAUST Ibn Rushd Fellow at the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia, in 2019. Prior to his doctoral studies, he earned his B.Sc. (2013) from Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, USA, and his M.Sc. (2015) from KAUST. Dr. Alfaraj is currently a Research Associate with the Helmy Group, and his research interests encompass the growth, fabrication, and characterization of CMOS-compatible semiconductor nanostructures and devices for nanophotonic applications, utilizing hybrid metallic architectures. He is an IEEE Senior Member.

Nasir's research investigated the design and clean-environment fabrication of solid-state and optoelectronic devices, including field-effect transistors and light-emitting diodes. His research expertise spans the areas of flexible electronics; optoelectronic device growth, fabrication, and characterization; and free-space optical communication. His research interests included Growth, fabrication, and characterization of group-III-nitride-based nanostructures for next-generation devices, Semiconductor physics and Quantum mechanics.

KAUST alumna Dr. Rabab Alomairy earned both her M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) under the supervision of Professor David E. Keyes and Senior Research Scientist Hatem Ltaief. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at MIT’s JuliaLab and a recipient of the KAUST Ibn Rushd Fellowship.

Her research spans high-performance computing (HPC), task-based numerical libraries, GPU programming and AI-accelerated scientific applications, with emphasis on performance optimization for multicore and many-core architectures. Dr. Alomairy has collaborated with leading institutions, including Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Innovative Computing Laboratory at the University of Tennessee and MINES ParisTech, contributing to the DOE-funded SLATE project during her internship at UTK.

In recognition of her impactful work, Dr. Alomairy was named a Rising Star in Computational and Data Sciences by the U.S. Department of Energy in 2022. She also led the first Julia tutorial for productive HPC at the Supercomputing Conference. Her work has scaled across the world’s top supercomputers and earned international honors, including a finalist recognition for the ACM Gordon Bell Prize (2020), the Gauss Award and the IEEE Computer Society Technical Community on High Performance Computing (TCHPC) Early Career Researchers Award for Excellence in High Performance Computing (2025).

Dr. Alomairy continues to advance sustainable computation and foster collaboration across disciplines, translating advances in HPC and AI into real-world impact.

• Task-based numerical libraries and applications
• Performance optimizations
• Artificial intelligence at large scale
• Dense linear algebra