Dania Samir Humaidan

I will always be proud to be an AIU alumnus!

I have always dreamed of becoming a computer scientist designing algorithms to solve problems. When I passed the high school tests (Baccalaureate) with high marks 289/290 I wanted to study computer science, but at the same time, my parents encouraged me to study human medicine. It was at that moment when the Arab International University helped me to get an exemption from the Minister of Higher Education to study both majors simultaneously, and offered me a full scholarship to study computer science. 

Studying at AIU was a very great experience with the highly qualified faculty, the up-to-date teaching material and the unique campus prepared with all required labs, libraries and canteens.

After graduating both universities in 2015, I wanted to learn how to use my knowledge in both fields to apply the algorithms on biological data, so I moved to Germany in 2016 to study the masters in Bioinformatics at Saarland University and I received a full scholarship from the the German Academic Exchange Agency (DAAD).

At Saarland University, they recognized many courses that I took at AIU and approved my grades without the need to pass the courses again, as they agreed that the teaching material and the quality of teaching is equivalent to that of German universities, which helped me finish the rest of the courses quicker and start working on my master thesis about the genes controlling the cell cycle, that I submitted in March 2018.

I finished my masters with the grade of Excellent and Honors degree. My thesis work was published at PLOS One journal and can be found at this link https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0208515.

At that time I had been accepted at the International Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems (IMPRS-IS) as a PhD student, that is a very competitive program with an acceptance rate of 7%. I started my PhD in April 2018 and published initial results at the Women in Machine Learning workshop that was held in Montreal, Canada in December 2018 and another paper is in press and can be found at this link https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.07412.