Dr. El-Mekkawy is a professor at Qatar University. He has a significant research experience in mathematical/simulation modeling, heuristics/metaheuristics, and simulation-based optimization to solve combinatorial optimization problems. He has research interest in scheduling optimization within manufacturing and healthcare; vehicle routing and logistics; and facility location within forward and reverse logistics under uncertainty. His research is supported by Qatar National Research Funding (QNRF), Canadian Industry, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). He has been recently appointed as member of the Discovery Grant Review Committee (EG1509), 2013 – 2016. He has over 100 publications, 42 of them are published in International Journals such as Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Journal of Renewable Energy, Journal for Energy Research, International journal of Production Research, ASME Transactions, Journal of Applied Soft Computing, AMJ, IJPE, IJCIM, IJAMT, IJOR, and EJIE.