I’m very pleased and proud that my PhD student Reem Suwaileh has successfully passed her dissertation defense yesterday without modifications — congratulations Dr. Reem for a graduation with a well deserved distinction! 👏👏👏

In a 5-year journey, Reem has achieved strong research record with publications at COLING, ACL, ECIR, IP&M, and IJDRR. But more importantly, she gained an invaluable experience working on a practical problem in a critical domain with few/rare data resources especially in Arabic. In parallel, she has also collaborated with her group mates in getting a Best Paper Award at WANLP 2022, served the community as PC member at prestigious conferences (e.g., SIGIR 2023), and co-organized CheckThat! Lab at CLEF 2018, 2019, and 2020. Furthermore, Reem has led the top distinguished graduates of QU this year! With that, I’m confident she can now serve the research community as a solid independent researcher!

Thanks to the great co-supervisor Dr. Muhammad Imran (QCRI, HBKU) for a smooth, complementary, and fruitful co-supervision and collaboration.

Thanks to the examination committee, Prof. Doina Caragea (Kansas State University), Prof. Cagatay Catal (QU), Dr. Abdelkarim Erradi (QU), and Prof. Fayçal Bensaali (QU) for their support and valuable feedback.

Thanks to Qatar National Research Fund for supporting Reem’s PhD with GSRA grant.