Description

Join us for the annual Alumni Lecture Series, a highlight in the University’s event calendar!

We welcome the return to KAUST of five alumni who will present highlights from their work in business, research, academia, industry, and innovation. 

Brought to you by KAUST Alumni and the Enrichment Office.

Disrupting Yourself by Albara Al Auhali

Disruption isn’t only for markets or businesses, but it’s also important on individual-level and can lead to amazing results. Just like any startup, unless we disrupt ourselves, we get stuck in the same place. This talk will give some hints on how to disrupt yourself.

Five Thousand Years: A Brief History of Chinese Science and Technology by Yiqiang Fan

Like any other ancient civilizations, China has a long history of science and technology, dating back to five thousand years ago. Ancient Chinese scientists were the first to observe the sunspots, they researched magnetic phenomena, but also calculated - as did the ancient Greeks- the precise value of the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle. The compass, gunpowder, paper, moveable type, bronze, and iron casting, or seismograph were all, without exception, inventions of the Chinese. “Five Thousand Years: A Brief History of Chinese Science and Technology” will present some of the most important Chinese inventions in science and technology in the development of history.

This is your time by Vasiliki Kordopati

We all need motivation and drive. But what actually all need, is to listen to ourselves and pursue our dreams. It is very important that you trust the timing of your life. When you don’t expect things to happen, they do happen. You won’t understand it at first, but you will one day. When you’ll look back at everything that had happened in your life, and you’ll finally realize why certain things happened later in life or early than you expected. In this talk, Vasiliki will focus on her experience as an fresh entrepreneur, innovator and leader of a great team. How a decision on a "right" time changed her directions

Time in Molecular Clocks by Vanessa Robitzch

In this lecture, Vanessa will talk about "molecular clocks". These “clocks” are an ancient and ubiquitous evolutionary masterpiece of DNA, which do not tell you the current time, but time in the past. Molecular clocks can tell when a certain event occurred by keeping track of the number of changes in a genome (mutations) over time. Many of these changes occur at a constant rate: just like seconds, minutes, or hours. However, over many generations and thus, in most species, over hundreds or thousands of years. They can also clocks tell us when species evolved, even for species without fossil records; and working backward in time. Molecular clocks can also help organize the evolutionary timeline or schedule: by comparing genomic data of different organisms we have also learned that bats and dolphins are actually closer related than sharks and tunas!

From Milliseconds to Oil & Gas by Hassan Al-Ismail

With the Saudi 2030 Vision, the economic structure of the Kingdom is changing and becoming more diversified. However, the oil and gas industry remains as a main contributor to the national income. There’s so much that goes on behind the scenes before a new oil/gas discovery is announced; including a crucial step called “static corrections” of seismic data which allows us to see photos of the subsurface of the earth in the “time” dimension (as opposed to the more “intuitive” photos in the depth dimension). In this lecture, Hassan will focus on his work at Saudi Aramco after he graduated from KAUST in 2014; which deals with leading a team that consists of 9 geophysicists who work in generating near-surface velocity models to calculate this static correction and obtain high quality seismic images of the subsurface of the earth, with the aim of helping geologic interpreters generate structural images and choose locations for their rigs (thus, we go from milliseconds in the time dimension, to discovering hydrocarbon fields). Throughout his talk, he will also briefly go over the elements of a petroleum system and the oil and gas exploration cycle (from data acquisition to prospect generation, or in other words, pinpointing an area with hydrocarbon potential that should be drilled).

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