Nouri Sakr is an assistant professor of data science and operations research at the computer science and engineering department. She is also a member of the advisory board for the newly launched data science undergraduate program at The American University in Cairo (AUC).

Sakr received her PhD from Columbia University where she worked on data-driven combinatorial optimization and efficient machine learning frameworks under the supervision of Cliff Stein. As an undergraduate at AUC, she double majored in computer science and actuarial science with a minor in economics, then spent eight months at the University of Waterloo to complete a Master's of Mathematics in actuarial science where her main research focus was on FinTech.

Her research focuses on leveraging connections between data science and combinatorial optimization to design data-driven algorithms that efficiently tackle real-world optimization challenges with social impact. At Amazon and Microsoft, she worked on supply chain analytics, dynamic inventory allocation and cloud storage traffic problems. During her PhD, she was an affiliate of the Data Science Institute, where she accumulated further experience on building fast machine learning frameworks and adaptive machine learning in cybersecurity through her collaborations with Google Brain and Sandia National Labs. She also built healthcare solutions for Columbia Medical Center and collaborated with Graham Windham in NYC to look into improving foster care matchings. In Egypt, she advises multiple startups and multinational organizations on their data science work and aims to involve as many students as possible in research and industrial collaborations that can help them expand their exposure and knowledge horizon.

As a huge supporter to interdisciplinarity, Sakr founded the Data Science Hub (DSH) as a collaboration platform for academics and industry professionals as well as research scholars from Egypt and abroad. The projects at the DSH apply data science techniques in interdisciplinary areas, such as in education, healthcare, fintech, system scheduling, psychology and economics. Recently, interns at the DSH have been involved in research related to education under the pandemic, reinforcement learning and more recently an exciting new project related to GDP with the Central Bank of Egypt as well as research work using GANs for oil and gas problems with RAISA Energy.