MBZUAI opens the 2026-27 academic year with first cohorts in computational biology and human-computer interaction

More than 400 new students from over 50 countries have arrived at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) this week, taking enrolment above 900. Among them are the first cohorts in computational biology and human-computer interaction.

The incoming class comprises more than 260 graduate and 140 undergraduate students. More than 40 of the new PhD students completed their master’s at MBZUAI before returning for doctoral study.

MBZUAI continues to attract exceptional students, with 33% graduate students holding degrees from the world’s top 100 universities (CSRankings), including Boston, Brown, Columbia, Harvard, NYU, The University of Tokyo, Tsinghua, UCLA, University of Cambridge, and University of Toronto.

Emirati students make up the largest nationality group in the incoming class, and women are more than half of that cohort.

Twenty-four researchers have joined the faculty since January, bringing the total to 140, further extending the University’s work across the Division of Biological and Life Sciences and the Division of Computing and Mathematical Sciences.

The faculty includes recipients of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award, MacArthur Fellowship, and the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, alongside fellows of the IEEE, ACM, Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and International Society for Computational Biology.

“MBZUAI attracts researchers at every stage – from those who have decades defining their fields, to those who are beginning to shape them,” said Thamar Solorio, Vice Provost of Faculty Excellence and Advancement, and Professor of Natural Language Processing.

“More than 40 of this year’s PhD students did their master’s here and chose to come back,” said Dezhen Song, Vice Provost for Student and Postdoctoral Affairs, and Professor of Robotics. “This is the clearest signal we have about the research environment, because those students had every other option available to them.”