MBZUAI starts new academic year with distinguished global researchers

MBZUAI has opened the 2026/27 academic year with a growing community of internationally distinguished researchers and educators. 

Twenty-four faculty have joined across its divisions of Biological and Life Sciences and Computing and Mathematical Sciences since January, bringing the total number to 140. Of the new joiners, 13 hold residential appointments at MBZUAI while 11 are affiliated, adjunct or visiting faculty. 

They are part of a wider faculty community whose distinctions include some of the world’s leading research honors. Professor Carlos Bustamante, Acting Director of Research Translation, Associate Dean for Research and Professor of Personalized Medicine, is a MacArthur Fellow; while Professor Sami Haddadin, Chief Scientist for the Agentic Robotics Lab, received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in 2019. Among this year’s appointments, Professor Anil Jain received the 2025 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Information and Communication Technologies. 

MBZUAI is currently ranked 10th globally across AI, computational biology, computer vision, machine learning, natural language processing, and robotics according to CSRankings. 

“It’s a genuine pleasure to welcome our new colleagues to MBZUAI,” said Eran Segal, Dean of the Division of Biological and Life Sciences and Professor of Computational Biology. “They arrive from some of the world’s leading institutions and bring a breadth that is unusual for a division of our size: foundation models for biology, biomedical imaging, single-cell and multi-omics, and clinical translation. 

“We have a remarkable opportunity to combine AI with large-scale human data through the Human Phenotype Project and the Emirati Genome Program, which are unique to us, to advance research that can improve health in the UAE and beyond.” 

“We are delighted to welcome an exceptional group of internationally recognized leaders and outstanding emerging scholars to MBZUAI,” added Éric Moulines, Dean of the Computing and Mathematical Sciences Division and Professor of Machine Learning.  

“Their complementary expertise will enable more ambitious, integrated research and further establish the University as a global center of excellence in foundational and applied AI. Our ambition is not merely to participate in the next phase of artificial intelligence, but to help define its scientific foundations and shape its future.” 

Meet our new faculty 

Shai Carmi 

Affiliated Associate Professor of Human Genetics 

Professor Carmi holds a Ph.D. in physics from Bar-Ilan University, and is a 2023 Blavatnik Award winner in Life Sciences. Alongside his role at MBZUAI, he is Associate Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research has examined genetic genealogy, Ashkenazi population history, and the opportunities and limitations of polygenic embryo screening. 

Arnak Dalalyan 

Affiliated Professor of Statistics and Data Science 

Alongside his role at MBZUAI, Professor Dalalyan is a Professor of Statistics at ENSAE Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris. His work spans mathematical statistics, learning theory and generative modeling, and he was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for 2025–2030. 

Anqing Duan 

Assistant Professor of Robotics 

Professor Duan completed his Ph.D. in robotics through the Italian Institute of Technology and University of Genoa and previously worked as a research associate at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research combines machine learning, control, and optimization for human-centered robots, including robotic systems for healthcare applications. 

Augusto Afonso Guerra Junior 

Visiting Associate Professor of Epidemiology 

Professor Guerra is a Professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil, where he coordinates research centers in health technology assessment and pharmacogenomics. His work uses real-world health data to evaluate the effectiveness, safety and value of medicines, including oncology and rare disease therapies. 

Yingyao Hu 

Visiting Professor of Economics 

Professor Hu is a Professor of Economics at Johns Hopkins University, where he has worked since 2007. A Fellow of the Journal of Econometrics, his research develops econometric methods for problems involving measurement error, latent variables, labor markets and industrial organization. 

Anil Jain 

Adjunct Distinguished Professor of Computer Vision 

Alongside his role at MBZUAI, Professor Jain is University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University. A member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, his fingerprint, face, and iris recognition research underpins identity systems used by governments and industry worldwide. 

Ajay Jasra 

Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and Professor of Statistics and Data Science 

Professor Jasra joins MBZUAI after serving as Professor of Data Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and previously as Associate Dean and Professor at KAUST. A Ph.D. graduate of Imperial College London, his research includes Bayesian inference, stochastic simulation and sequential Monte Carlo methods. 

Igor Jurisica 

Affiliated Professor of Computational Biology 

Alongside his role at MBZUAI, Professor Jurisica is Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto and a Senior Scientist at University Health Network. He also serves as Scientific Director of the World Community Grid and develops computational approaches for identifying disease signatures, drug combinations, and altered biological pathways from large biomedical datasets. 

Nikolaos Kyrpides 

Professor of Computational Biology 

Professor Kyrpides joins MBZUAI after more than two decades at the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute, where he lead its Genome Biology Program and development of the Integrated Microbial Genomes platform since 2004. He later also led the institute’s metagenomics and microbiome data science programs. 

Klaus Hermann Maier-Hein 

Affiliated Professor of Computer Vision 

Alongside his role at MBZUAI, Professor Maier-Hein is Professor at Heidelberg University and heads both the Division of Medical Image Computing at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), and the Section for Pattern Analysis and Learning at Heidelberg University Hospital. His group helped develop nnU-Net, a self-configuring framework for biomedical image segmentation that has become an influential tool in medical image analysis. 

Lena Maier-Hein 

Affiliated Professor of Computer Vision 

As well as her role at MBZUAI, Professor Maier-Hein is Managing Director of the National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT) Heidelberg. She heads the Division of Intelligent Medical Systems (IMSY) at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), and serves as Managing Director of the cross-program initiative “Data Science and Digital Oncology”. A Fellow of the MICCAI Society and recipient of the German Cancer Award, her research has produced work on evaluating and validating medical image-analysis algorithms and AI-assisted surgery. 

Serghei Mangul 

Affiliated Assistant Professor of Computational Biology 

Professor Mangul serves as Assistant Professor of Computational Biology at the University of Southern California and completed postdoctoral research at UCLA. A U.S. Fulbright Scholar, he develops methods and infrastructure for genomic and biomedical data analysis and founded the Bioinformatics for Ukraine initiative. 

Alla Mikheenko 

Assistant Professor of Computational Biology 

Professor Mikheenko joins from University College London, where she applied computational genomics to neurodegenerative disease. As a member of the Telomere-to-Telomere Consortium, she contributed to the first complete sequence of a human genome. 

Adrian Monck 

Professor of Journalism and Senior Advisor 

Professor Monck previously served as Managing Director and a member of the Managing Board of the World Economic Forum, and is a Senior Adviser to UN Trade and Development. An Oxford graduate in modern history, his work spans journalism, communications, geopolitics and international relations. 

Cedric Notredame 

Professor of Computational Biology 

Professor Notredame joins from the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona. His laboratory produced T-Coffee, one of the most widely used sequence-alignment programs in biology, and originated Nextflow, the workflow system that now runs genomics pipelines in thousands of labs. 

Antonio David Paez Espino 

Adjunct Associate Professor of Personalized Medicine 

Professor Paez Espino is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Ancilia Biosciences and previously led discovery informatics and metagenomics at Mammoth Biosciences. Following postdoctoral work at UC Berkeley and the DOE Joint Genome Institute, he helped uncover more than 125,000 previously unknown viral genomes and has worked on CRISPR-based technologies and global virome analysis. 

Divya Ramesh 

Assistant Professor of Human-Computer Interaction 

Professor Ramesh joins from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her research examines algorithmic accountability and human-AI decision-making, following earlier research experience at Google Research and Microsoft Research and engineering work in computer vision. 

Saptarshi Roy 

Assistant Professor of Statistics and Data Science 

Professor Roy joins MBZUAI having completed a joint postdoctoral fellowship in computer science and statistics at the University of Texas at Austin. His research develops statistical foundations for generative models, privacy, reinforcement learning and high-dimensional learning. 

Numan Saeed 

Assistant Teaching Professor 

Professor Saeed became MBZUAI’s first Ph.D. graduate in 2023 and now researches medical imaging and multimodal machine learning. He is principal organizer of the HECKTOR medical-imaging challenge at MICCAI and holds a U.S. patent covering deep-learning methods for head-and-neck tumor segmentation and survival prediction. 

Artem Shelmanov 

Assistant Professor of Practice of Natural Language Processing 

Professor Shelmanov previously led NLP research programs at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute and conducted postdoctoral research at Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology. His work focuses on uncertainty estimation and hallucination detection in large language models, including LM-Polygraph, an open framework for evaluating uncertainty in model outputs. 

Jaspal Singh 

Assistant Professor of Computer Science 

Professor Singh joins after his postdoctoral research at Purdue University and the Georgia Institute of Technology. His work focuses on cryptography and privacy, particularly secure multiparty computation and private information retrieval, with research published at venues including CRYPTO, TCC and ACM CCS. 

Alexandre Tsybakov 

Affiliated Professor of Statistics and Data Science 

Alongside his role at MBZUAI, Professor Tsybakov is a Professor at ENSAE Paris and Sorbonne Université, and an Institute of Mathematical Statistics Fellow. The author of three books and more than 150 journal papers, his work has shaped areas including nonparametric estimation, high-dimensional statistics and statistical learning theory. 

Dongxia Wu 

Assistant Professor of Statistics and Data Science 

Professor Wu joins after postdoctoral research at Stanford University. His work develops uncertainty-aware machine-learning methods for scientific applications, and earlier research produced DeepGLEAM – a COVID-19 forecasting system that achieved the highest coverage ranking in the CDC Forecasting Hub. 

Yanding Zhao 

Assistant Professor of Computational Biology 

Professor Zhao completed postdoctoral research at Stanford University after earning his Ph.D. in genetics at Dartmouth College. His work links structural variation and three-dimensional genome architecture in cancer, including computational research identifying enhancer mutations and promoter-enhancer interactions on extrachromosomal DNA.