“A university is as distinctive as its faculty,” said KAUST President Jean-Lou Chameau recently at the 2014 Faculty Recognition dinner. The evening’s purpose was to celebrate the University’s faculty, along with their dedicated spouses. It also highlighted faculty promotions and welcomed new faculty members.

Remarking on the impressive amount of publications and citations data generated from KAUST research output, in just a few years, President Chameau reveled in the fact that this puts our University on par with some of the best science and engineering-focused institutions in the world. In a nutshell, the quality faculty members that KAUST has been able to attract, who in turn generate numerous high-impact publications and citations, continues to draw in the best students, postdocs and researchers.

“You should be proud of what you are doing,” said Dr. Chameau. He added that it’s exciting to see KAUST faculty being advertised in the media in a variety of ways; referring to the back cover ad on Time Magazine last month. The ad was purchased by Apple and featured Prof. Michael Berumen demonstrating his much-heralded iDive device in action.

While individually honoring the over a dozen new faculty members who have joined KAUST in the past 6 to 9 months, Dr. Chameau also encouraged both established and new faculty members, who were purposely made to sit on cross-disciplinary tables for the dinner, to converse throughout the evening and get acquainted with one another. “Make sure to spend some time talking to someone you don’t know tonight to ensure that we work across disciplines. There should be some research ideas coming out of this evening,” said Dr. Chameau to the faculty in attendance.

The new faculty members welcomed were: Moussa Benhamed (Assistant Professor, Bioscience), Carlo Liberale (Assistant Professor, Bioscience), Andrea Falqui (Associate Professor, Bioscience), Diogo Gomes (Associate Professor, Applied Mathematics and Computational Sciences), Daniele Daffonchio (Professor, Bioscience), Takashi Gojobori (Distinguished Professor and Associate Director of the Computational Bioscience Research Center), Wolfgang Heidrich (Professor and Director of the Visual Computing Center), Heribert Hirt (Professor, Bioscience), Omar Knio (Professor, Applied Mathematics and Computational Sciences), TorOve Leiknes (Professor, Environmental Science and Engineering), and Xixian Zhang (Former Director of Core Labs, now Professor, Material Science and Engineering).

The newly promoted faculty members welcomed were: Michael Berumen (to rank of Associate Professor, Marine Science), Markus Hadwiger (to rank of Associate Professor, Computer Science), Samir Hamdan (to rank of Associate Professor, Bioscience), Ibrahim Hoteit (to rank of Associate Professor, Earth Science and Engineering), Andy Kuo-Wei Huang (to rank of Associate Professor, Chemical Science), David Ketcheson (to rank of Associate Professor, Applied Mathematics and Computational Science), Peng Wang (to rank of Associate Professor, Environmental Science and Engineering), and Udo Schwingenschlögl (to rank of Professor, Material Science and Engineering).