A comic character developed by an AUC student to raise public health awareness is becoming an official pharmaceutical mascot.
While working as an intern at Alexandria University hospital, Sara Nasr, a graduate student at AUC’s Institute of Global Health and Human Ecology (I-GHHE), witnessed constant misfortunes. However, the young physician-in-training found herself particularly touched by the stories of children suffering from hemophilia.
“Not only were they burdened with their sickness, but they also had to deal with the way the community views them,” Nasr explained.
Hemophilia is a rare bleeding disorder commonly caused by missing or defective factor VIII (8), a clotting protein found in blood. Due to the stigma attached to the disorder, many children suffering from hemophilia are kept under strict surveillance and have their activities limited for fear of injury. Nasr noted that some parents were even afraid to touch their children.
Students are rethinking traditional concepts in designing architectural plans for a green town in Egypt.
On a windy afternoon in February, AUC students from the Urban Design and Landscape Architecture course, taught by Momen El-Husseiny, assistant professor in the Department of Architecture, piled out of a bus and onto the sandy grounds of Mostakbal (Future) City — one of Cairo’s up-and-coming satellite cities located in the desert about 55 kilometers east of Tahrir Square.
Humming with a mixture of excitement and confusion, the students looked around at the barren lot that would soon be home to one group’s masterplan for Egypt’s first-of-its-kind college town, Bloomfields.
Human-centered design thinking approach is a core part of the AUC educational experience.
By integrating design thinking into the curriculum, AUC is teaching students to approach complicated problems with a sense of empathy, creativity and resilience, explained Hoda Mostafa, professor of practice and director of the University’s Center for Learning and Teaching (CLT).
Design thinking is a methodology used by Fortune 500 companies, including Apple and J.P. Morgan, to transform their way of operating and develop innovative, customer-centric products and services. International development institutions, such as the World Food Programme and UNESCO, have employed it to create policies and programs that effectively address poverty, gender inequality and other complex global challenges.
Bringing technology to life carries with it privacy and societal implications.
Here are some of the technologies AUC students have contributed to in just the last several years: a self-navigating wheelchair, applications that route traffic more intelligently and a smart mirror capable of determining a person’s vitals.
Sherif Aly ’96, professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, pointed out that this is only the beginning when it comes to pervasive computing systems enabled by artificial intelligence. “Years of innovation could be happening in days by virtue of how fast those kinds of systems are thinking and innovating,” Aly said. “It’s very likely that you start seeing stuff that showed up in science fiction movies turning yet again into science facts. You could be literally wearing your VR headset and say, ‘Hey Meta, can you replay memories of my fifth birthday with my friends?’”
Launched last week, AUC’s Climate Change Initiative capitalizes on AUC’s contributions to national and international efforts in tackling one of the greatest challenges of our time. The initiative includes research, student activities, teaching and learning, outreach, tracking and reducing our carbon footprint, writing school textbooks on climate change and providing climate change solutions in specific contexts within the country.
“Our aim in this initiative is to reinforce AUC’s role as an active academic hub on climate change and sustainable development in Egypt and the region, as well as an active contributor to global efforts addressing climate change challenges,” said President Ahmad Dallal. “Of course, COP27, hosted in Egypt in November, provides an incentive to catalyze AUC’s climate change initiative.”
Dallal outlined the initiative’s five main areas of focus that are fully aligned with national and regional climate change and sustainability priorities:
Water-related issues
Green architecture and sustainable urban development
Green finance
Global health
Energy transition
These areas of focus also overlap with a number of “cross-cutting issues” ––adaptation to climate change, resilience of communities, mitigation measures, education and a just transition –– that are relevant to Asia and the region. “We encourage a multidisciplinary approach in addressing challenges, including policy, regulatory frameworks, financing, scientific research and social science aspects,” said Dallal.
UN Climate Change High-Level Champion for Egypt and Executive Director of the International Monetary Fund Mahmoud Mohieldin, who was the keynote speaker at the event, highlighted five distinctive features of COP27, which AUC will participate in next fall:
A holistic approach to climate change
“We cannot ignore poverty, hunger, job creation and an inclusive approach to the whole [climate change] agenda, including the impact of climate change on children, youth and women."
Implementation of previous promises outlined in the climate change agenda and action plan
“We don’t need new frameworks; we just need to apply what we have. If there is a good idea, let’s projectize it. You [AUC] have good ideas, and you have been teaching about them, so [the focus now is] how to apply them on your scale, with the hope that this could be scaled up or replicated somewhere else.”
For the first time in the history of COPs, there is an alignment between the COP agenda, G13 and the rest of the SDGs [UN Sustainable Development Goals], with five major events to correlate the promise of finance coming from different institutions with the pipeline of projects, especially those focusing on mitigation, decarbonization and race to zero.
“This is a very practical approach based on a country-platform design, with five regional roundtables [across the world] – and I’m inviting you to participate in any capacity you wish. … It’s not just about Egypt and the local community. It’s about the region, Arab countries, the Mediterranean, Africa and beyond.”
Localization (bottom-up approach): For the first time, Egypt’s 27 governorates will be participating through their big, small and medium enterprises, startups, as well as women-led community development initiatives in a two-month competition to choose the project that offers the smartest and greenest solutions, after which a team of national winners will be selected.
“It’s not about the competition; it’s about [showcasing] the talents and skills in the governorates, and it’s a chance to demonstrate what they’re doing. … It is customary for rich countries to host big conferences to be attended by 30,000 plus participants, [including] heads of state, but ordinary people would always wonder, ‘What's in it for us? Why do we have this conference?’ And this is legitimate.”
Finance through partnerships, investments, international financial institutions, as well as public and private sector funding
“Without finance and investments, without the resources available to us –– not just financial resources, but technology and knowledge [as well] – nothing will really progress, and many of these ideas may end up with frustration. There will be some serious discussion about [funding] opportunities."
Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research Khaled Abdel-Ghaffar awarded the ministry shield to four undergraduate students in the Department of Construction Engineering who have developed self-luminous concrete to light up roadways and pavements at night without using conventional energy sources.
Abdel-Ghaffar met with the four students — Zainab Mahmoud, Fatma Elnefaly, Mayar Khairy and Menna Soliman — who worked on the research project as part of their graduation thesis.
The minister expressed his admiration for the project and stressed the importance of transforming research ideas by youth into reality because of their benefit to society and positive impact on the environment, which aligns with Egypt’s strategy to implement the Sustainable Development Goals.
The students explained to Abdel-Ghaffar that their interest in the project stemmed from their knowledge of the negative environmental impacts of using concrete. "The idea of our research came from wanting to make an integral construction material like concrete more sustainable and environmentally friendly in both its creation and function," Mahmoud recalled.
Abdel-Ghaffar encouraged the students to complete their research to achieve the best results. The students, in turn, affirmed that they would continue their scientific endeavors.
“Using this material in Egypt in such a context will reduce heavy reliance on electricity and accordingly be an active step towards fighting climate change and saving the environment," Mahmoud said.
Mohamed Nagib AbouZeid, professor of construction engineering and the team's supervisor, expressed his happiness and pride in the four students and his optimism for the future of scientific research in Egypt. He also highlighted the need to conduct further studies to enhance the properties of the self-luminous concrete and to produce larger quantities for testing at the implementation site. AbouZeid stressed that AUC plays a crucial role in providing opportunities for its students to excel, carry out impactful research, innovate and be creative.
Hesham Sallam, associate professor at AUC’s Institute of Global Health and Human Ecology in the School of Sciences and Engineering and founder of Mansoura University’s Vertebrate Paleontology Center (MUVP), led an Egyptian team’s discovery of a new kind of large-bodied meat-eating dinosaur, or theropod, from a celebrated fossil site in the Sahara Desert of Egypt - revealing important secrets about the Prehistoric Era in the region.
A paper describing the discovery was published today in the scientific journal Royal Society Open Science. The study, led by Belal Salem of MUVP and graduate student at Ohio University, is the result of a collaboration between international researchers.
The new fossil is a very well-preserved vertebra, or backbone, from the base of the neck of a theropod. It was recovered by a 2016 MUVP expedition to the Bahariya Oasis of the Western Desert of Egypt.
Abelisaurid vertabra in the field
The Bahariya Oasis has always been known for its rich fossils and the discovery of the most famous dinosaurs in the world. “However, the vertebra described in the new paper belongs to an abelisaurid, a kind of bulldog-faced, short-armed theropod that had not been discovered in the oasis before and that is estimated to have been roughly six meters (20 feet) in body length,” said Salem.
“About 98 million years ago, the Bahariya Oasis was not known by this name. Rather, it was the ‘Dinosaur Oasis’ in every sense of the word,” Sallam described. “It was an oasis teeming with life, in which bloody fights prevailed between different animals and moreover dinosaurs. The dinosaurs lived along the banks of the oasis, by an ancient river known as the ‘Giant River’ — where one of the largest carnivorous and also herbivorous dinosaurs lived.”
Belal Salem with Abelisaurid vertabra
The oasis is renowned within paleontological circles for having yielded the type specimens (the original, first-discovered, name-bearing fossils) of several extraordinary dinosaurs during the early 20th century, including, most famously, Spinosaurus. Unfortunately, all Bahariya dinosaur fossils collected prior to World War II were destroyed during an Allied bombing of Munich in 1944.
Renewed interest and recent expeditions to the Bahariya Oasis led by researchers from AUC and MUVP have discovered new fossils from this classic site, helping to restore its paleontological legacy and adding additional species to its already rich fossil fauna.
Joining Sallam in the study are Patrick O’Connor, professor of biomedical sciences at Ohio University; Matt Lamanna, associate curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CMNH); Sanaa El-Sayed, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan and the MUVP’s former vice director; colleagues from Benha University, Egypt and the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency. CMNH Vertebrate Paleontology Scientific Illustrator Andrew McAfee produced or assisted with most of the illustrations for the paper.
“More than two decades ago, when my collaborators and I started searching for dinosaurs in the Bahariya Oasis, we dreamed of the day when a homegrown Egyptian paleontological research group would continue our work. Thanks to Hesham, Sanaa, Belal, and others at MUVP, that day has finally come,” said Lamanna.
O’Connor said: “Identifying definitive abelisaurid from Bahariya is very exciting for Egypt and MUVP, as this group of predatory dinosaurs continues to tell us a lot about vertebrate communities during the Cretaceous Period, and in particular, how Gondwanan ecosystems were assembled and maintained for a large part of Earth history during the final period of the Mesozoic Era.”
Abelisaurids—most notably represented by the demonic-looking Carnotaurus from Patagonia of Jurassic World fame—were among the most diverse and geographically widespread large predatory dinosaurs in Europe and the Southern Hemisphere continents during the later stages of the Mesozoic Era, or Age of Dinosaurs.
Abelisaurid reconstruction. Image by Andrew McAfee, Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
The unnamed abelisaurid represented by the new vertebra, alongside Spinosaurus and two other giant theropods (Carcharodontosaurus and Bahariasaurus), adds yet another species to the cadre of large predatory dinosaurs that roamed what’s now the Egyptian Sahara during the middle of the Cretaceous Period.
Dinosaurs from the very end of the Cretaceous, shortly before the devastating asteroid impact that closed the curtain on the Mesozoic Era 66 million years ago, are vanishingly rare on the entire African continent, yet fossil-bearing rocks exposed in other Western Desert oases are beginning to reveal their secrets.
“In terms of Egyptian dinosaurs, we’ve really just scratched the surface,” concludes Sallam. “Who knows what else might be out there?”
Sallam and MUVP team members at the Bahariya Oasis, 2018
Nageh Allam receives 2022 Obada International Prize
Nageh Allam, professor and director of the nanotechnology graduate program at AUC’s Department of Physics, has won the 2022 Obada Prize for Distinguished Scientists in Physical Sciences, for his multidisciplinary research on water desalination and energy conversion and storage.
Each year, the prize “recognizes and encourages innovative and interdisciplinary research that cuts across traditional boundaries and paradigms,” its website reads. “It aims to foster universal values of excellence, creativity, justice, democracy, and progress and to promote the scientific, technological and humanistic achievements that advance and improve our world.”
Allam feels honored to be a recipient of the prestigious award.
“This is a recognition of my efforts in fostering an environment where my students are inspired to exert exceptional efforts in tackling multidisciplinary science and engineering problems and finding out-of-the-box solutions,” he said.
Though Allam is no stranger to top-level recognition — as he is among the top 2% of the world’s most impactful scientists and was recently ranked #7 in Research.com's list of top materials scientists in Egypt — the professor still draws motivation from each accolade.
“This award has inspired me and my research team to continue our journey in solving complex problems that directly affect our community and the world,” he said.
