For a long time, I thought that the most important moment in my academic career was the moment I got my PhD, until I realized that the moments when my students got their PhDs were much more important!

Thank God for the graduation of my fifth PhD student at Qatar University. I am proud of them all and consider them the greatest achievement in my academic career.

Thank God, my student Marwa Essam successfully defended her PhD dissertation yesterday without any modifications by the unanimous agreement of the examination committee that included Prof. Iadh Ounis, Prof. Abdelaziz Bouras, Prof. Saeed Salim, and Prof. Ahmed Mohammed Massoud.

Marwa’s dissertation addressed a challenging research problem, which is “Background Linking of News Articles”. Marwa proposed three algorithms to tackle the problem, which represent the State of the Art performance in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.

During her PhD journey, Marwa received the “Best Doctoral Consortium Paper” Award from the ECIR conference (one of the top conferences in our IR research area) in 2021, and the second place in the TREC Conference (the largest research competitions in our field) for her research problem in 2019. Her research has been published in CIKM, ECIR, TREC conferences, and PeerJ Computer Science journal, all of which are reputable publication venues in our field.

Most importantly, Marwa achieved all of this while being a mother of three daughters of varying ages, the eldest of whom is about to enter university soon, God willing!

I am proud of what Marwa has presented and achieved, and I strongly believe that what she has learned as a researcher is the actual product of the tough PhD journey! I pray to God to benefit her with what HE has taught her, and to benefit HIS Ummah with her knowledge.