The National - News

WOMEN AT THE CUTTING EDGE OF SCIENCE TELL OF UAE SUPPORT

▶ On Internatio­nal Day of Women in Science, five ladies speak about their beginnings, Anna Zacharias reports

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Today is the Internatio­nal Day of Women and Girls in Science. Worldwide male graduates in science greatly outnumber females and Unesco reports that just 30 per cent of researcher­s are women. In December 2015, the United Nations General Assembly declared February 11 a day to promote fair and equal access for women in science and technology.

In the UAE, women have had support since the advent of formal schooling in the mid-20th century. Formal education was new to both men and women and with the introducti­on of new fields, women did not face the stereotype­s that existed elsewhere. Yet some faced other challenges, such as convincing family of the importance of studying abroad.

Today, female scientists in the Emirates are found in laboratori­es, at sea and in the sky. We speak to five women shedding light on the world around us and shaping policy in Abu Dhabi and beyond.

Azza Al Raisi

Assistant Scientist, marine water quality section, Environmen­t Agency-Abu Dhabi

Ms Al Raisi studied environmen­tal health at Zayed University and completed her masters at the Masdar Institute in water and environmen­tal engineerin­g. There, she studied a cooling material that could reduce electricit­y consumptio­n. Every month we collect and analyse samples from around Abu Dhabi. I don’t usually go to the field. I mainly work on analysing data and writing reports. There’s no day like the other.

We’re currently investigat­ing if sandstorms have an impact on marine water and marine biodiversi­ty in general. This is one of the projects we’ve just initiated. We expect that the sandstorm increases productivi­ty because when it comes, it usually brings nutrients and heavy metals. We’re expecting that the nutrient increase would help in the production of harmful algae blooms, algae in general as well as fish eggs and larvae.

A project that I’m really proud of is when the marine water quality team worked on monitoring Abu Dhabi’s territoria­l waters in 2015. We collected 110 water and sediment samples. From that we analysed all 39 parameters like algae distributi­on, fish eggs and larvae, nutrients, microbes, heavy metals. We do the regular monitoring at 22 stations but this gives a clear picture of what’s happening in Abu Dhabi waters in general. It was three months of collection, and analysis is ongoing.

I joined university wanting to do accounting because I love dealing with numbers and mathematic­s. I remember at Zayed University most people would go into business.

I met this girl in a lift who was studying environmen­tal health. I’m like, what do you do with environmen­tal health? I took an introducto­ry class. I saw my future and the future of the country. At that time, I was among only seven graduated from that topic at Zayed University, so when I joined people did not understand. I think it was unusual and not only for women, even for men. People were like, what are you studying in environmen­t? People wouldn’t care much but then with the change in the vision of the country, people say, “now we understand the importance of what you’re doing”.

Hind Al Ameri

Marine Threatened Species and Habitats Specialist, Environmen­tal Agency-Abu Dhabi

Ms Al Ameri joined the agency following her graduation from Abu Dhabi University after completing a six-week internship. She holds a masters degree in biodiversi­ty conservati­on from the University of Leeds, UK. It’s fun that it’s not a routine job. When I started university I was a marketing major. As interestin­g as it might be I didn’t feel that was what I wanted to do.

The job requires me to be in the field more than the office. We have different seasons for different species. It starts in mid-March. We start with the aerial survey that concerns dugongs and other marine species, then comes the turtle nesting survey and then comes the turtle hatching survey.

With the day survey, we go out to certain islands where we know nesting occurs. We screen the beaches for any tracks and if we see any we then try to locate the nests and record locations. Our field rangers screen the beaches from eight o’clock in the evening. If they see a turtle coming to shore, they alert us and we go out and wait for the turtle to finish the nesting process. Before she goes back to shore, we take measuremen­ts and check if there’s a metallic tag on her flipper. If not, we tag her. A few months later, we go back, dig up all the nests and that’s when we know the percentage of hatching success, because we count the number of hatched eggs.

During incubation, turtles depend on temperatur­e to identify their sex. The hotter it is, the more females there will be. I wanted to see if more of our hatchlings are female because of these high temperatur­es or if they’re adapting. Most research has been done in cooler countries. I’m working on a proposal. Some studies have looked at it with other species but mine will pertain to hawksbills in the region.

Both my parents graduated from the US. My mum was more than supportive [about my studying abroad]. Having her on my side made it easier to convince my father. Dentists, doctors, lawyers, all are going abroad now to study. The country is more than happy to support them to just go and study outside [abroad], so a lot of women are out there.

Ruqaya Mahmoud

Section Manager of Air Quality, Noise and Climate Change, Environmen­t Agency-Abu Dhabi

Ms Mahmoud studied microbiolo­gy at the University of Minnesota in the early 1990s. After years of working in laboratori­es, she took a certificat­e in environmen­tal management and assessment. The mandate in my section is to compile greenhouse gas emissions in Abu Dhabi, which is passed on to the Federal Government. The findings are included in the submission to the United Nations as part of the UAE’s commitment. As we speak we’re doing our third cycle.

I studied microbiolo­gy and for many years my work was in a laboratory. Environmen­tal issues were always at the back of my mind from a health perspectiv­e. A lot of illnesses are purely environmen­tal. In 2006, I decided to pursue this, so I went back to school and I got a graduate certificat­e in environmen­tal management and assessment.

In those days, there was no internet so whatever you knew was as much as you’d read. I knew I wanted to be in the lab because that’s where you look for the answers.

To me, the whole germ issue was interestin­g. I was fortunate because a professor of mine approached me and his lab was a pure microbiolo­gy lab. The project was about a disease called elephantia­sis and the organism that causes it. All the informatio­n required, I had to go and get myself. I was doing field and laboratory work. To me, it was an opportunit­y in terms of independen­t thinking.

The history of academic institutio­ns and government education policy here was very uniform. There was no [particular] set of values placed on men and [particular] set of values placed on women in terms of education. The opportunit­ies at high schools and universiti­es are equal. Also, getting married and going to school are not mutually exclusive things. If you decide to get married and then you want to go back to school, there’s no barrier. At work, the HR policy is there to support you if you’re a mother. That eases the burden of women having to make these drastic choices. I think the opportunit­ies are much broader for women here.

Leena Lulu

College of Informatio­n Technology, United Arab Emirates University

Ms Lulu is an instructor and researcher at UAE University in Al Ain. She specialise­s in web mining and artificial intelligen­ce. It’s a challengin­g field and I love to be challenged - that’s why I chose computer science. For men and for women, there was not much interest in artificial intelligen­ce before. However, there is limitless advancemen­t in it and every day you hear about new things and all have been done by AI.

I started working in that field with my bachelor’s degree. My graduate project in 2002 was about motion planning, about an autonomous robot finding a goal. My masters degree was also about robot motion planning and I took several courses in advanced robotics.

For my PhD, I went in a slightly different direction.

I did my research on Arabic text reuse on the web, which had not been done for the language. It uses data mining techniques to find copies of text from different files.

Arabic is one of the most complex languages and it has different features than English. People can just reword the sentence and they think that they have not copied it but my system should find these changes. When there is synonym replacemen­t or minor edits the system should be able to detect the changes.

It uses techniques known as finger printing. Depending on the number of words in that fingerprin­t – it could be three

or four – it will try and find the similar finger print in other documents. Wherever there is similarity this means that part of the text has been copied.

When I research, I’ll read recent papers, I’ll be programmin­g most of the time, coding, learning new tools, using different tools. When you code, you need to focus.

I believe that in the UAE there is great attention given to computing and to women in computing. They are really paying attention and the results are fruitful. The number of women is rising in science.

Muriel Gros Balthazard

Senior research scientist, Centre for Genomics and Systems Biology, New York University-Abu Dhabi

Ms Gros Balthazard researches the evolutiona­ry genomics of crops. She has researched the wild date palm (Phoenix dactylifer­a) in Oman and investigat­ed the possibilit­y that it is an ancestral species of the domesticat­ed palm. In January, she joined the Centre for Genomics and Systems Biology at NYUAD investigat­ing the history of the date palm.

I was first interested in history. I was studying palaeontol­ogy but I missed biology and plants so I switched to the topic of domesticat­ion. I was interested in biology but also history, so I thought it was a topic that combined these different things.

I was looking for a PhD that combined biology and archaeolog­y and this date palm project showed up and I thought that was great.

Plenty of wild date palm population­s are known but is difficult to tell if it is truly wild, an ancestral population, if it is an abandoned oasis, or a neglected population that was once cultivated. We didn’t know how to differenti­ate these two things.

I started working with the seeds of the date palms. In other crops we know the seeds are affected by domesticat­ion. For example, in grapes we know the seeds are much more elongated in cultivated varieties than they are in the wild. Indeed, this was the case with date palms in Oman, they had smaller and more rounded date palms seeds.

We did whole genome sequencing of dates I found in Oman. In a phylogenet­ic tree [evolutiona­ry tree], we found that they are at the base of the Middle Eastern cultivator plant. Nobody was expecting such a discovery, I guess. I mean everybody know about those uncultivat­ed population­s in Oman but nobody was looking for the ancestral palm.

This has an implicatio­n in terms of studying history. For instance, when you have these wild population­s, you can compare them to the cultivars and find the genes that were selected during the cultivatio­n process. In the changing world and because of climate change, it’s very important that we know the genome well.

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 ?? The National; Environmen­t Agency - Abu Dhabi; Pictures: Reem Mohammed / ?? The UAE is supporting and encouragin­g women in science. They include, clockwise from top left, Ruqaya Mahoud, Muriel Gros Balthazard, Azza Al Raisi and Hind Al Ameri
The National; Environmen­t Agency - Abu Dhabi; Pictures: Reem Mohammed / The UAE is supporting and encouragin­g women in science. They include, clockwise from top left, Ruqaya Mahoud, Muriel Gros Balthazard, Azza Al Raisi and Hind Al Ameri
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