Where: Bldg 20 Auditorium
Credit: 4
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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Albara Al Auhali
Albara obtained his bachelor’s degree from KFUPM with first honors and pursued his MS in KAUST in computer sciences. He has worked at Saudi Aramco since 2009 and was appointed as a head of iThra, King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture, programs in 2016. He served as a Consultant for the Ministry of Economy and Planning in 2017, and he currently works as a Strategic Projects Director in Saudi Vision Realization Programs.
Hassan Al-Ismail
Hassn holds a MSc in geophysics from KAUST (2014) and a BS in geology and geophysics form UW-Madison (2010). He's now pursuing a part time MBA degree at HKUST and he is the Team Leader of the 2D Near Surface Modeling Team at Saudi Aramco. Previously, he worked in the same team as a geophysicist. When he was at KAUST, he won the IET Present Around the World competition (1st place in EMEA). Hassan was also selected to be the student speaker in the KAUST 2013 commencement ceremony. During his time at KAUST, he was the Chairman of the Graduate Student Council and President of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists student chapter. When he joined Aramco, he was selected as one of the 16 members of the Young Leaders Advisory Board (4th cohort). Currently, Hassan is the Young Professionals Officer at Dhahran Geoscience Society.
Vanessa Robitzch
Dr. Vanessa Robitzch was born on San Andres Isla, in the Colombian Caribbean. Amazed by the magnitude of our oceans and its mysterious inhabitant, she went on to study a Bachelor of Science in biology, at the University of Regensburg, Germany. She continued with a Masters in International Studies of Aquatic Tropical Ecology (ISATEC) at the Center for Marine Tropics (ZMT) in Bremen, Germany. In Fall, 2013, she joined the Reef Ecology Lab at KAUST as a PhD student in marine biology. Currently, Vanessa works as a postdoctoral research assistant for the Laboratory of Genomics and Molecular Ecology, in the Faculty of Ecology and Evolutionary Sciences at the Austral University of Chile (UACh), Valdivia.
Vasiliki Kordopati
Vasiliki is a Computer Engineer, and she holds an MSc in Computer Science from KAUST (2017). Since then, she changed her life from being a Computer Engineer to a General Manager of a startup. Vasiliki is a co-founder and CEO of Oæsis a spin-off KAUST startup. Oæsis is the world's first company that utilizes laser technology for growing plants. 2018 was a successful year for Vasiliki and her team, where they were one of the TAQADAM Accelerator Program winners, winners of StartupSaudi and top 10 in StartupIstanbul global competition.
Yiqiang Fan
is an associate professor at Beijing University of Chemical Technology, China, since 2015. He received a B.S. from Tianjin University in 2009, and as a founding student, he received an M.S. from KAUST. He obtained his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of British Columbia in 2015. His research interests lie in polymer microfluidics and the related applications in life science and medicine
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