About Us

Graduation Speech

Salaam Alaikum. Your highnesses, Your Excellencies, Khalifa graduates, parents, faculty, staff, friends and distinguished and honored guests. Firstly, a belated Happy National Day to you all. It is my great honor to be able to address you today on this truly special occasion in the presence of our Vice-Chairman His Highness Sheikh Hamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. Today is our first graduation ceremony as Khalifa University, after our founding just three short years ago. Having myself just joined as President on August 1, I share your sense of anticipation of the great promise Khalifa holds, and the special place we will carve out together in the UAE, the Middle East, and indeed the world.

The focus of today needs to be primarily on our graduates — it is a true honor to be amongst those who are here to celebrate their accomplishment. Any university can only be as strong as its students, and we are proud of our students not only for the degrees they have earned, but for the very fact that they chose to begin their professional careers, and their development as technical leaders in society, with us. We know that their careers will bring honor to them and to Khalifa and we look forward with anticipation to the accomplishments they will achieve in the years ahead.

Since this occasion is my first graduation after joining Khalifa as president, it seems like an opportune time to share some of my aspirations for our young university with you, and with the university community. One of the truly great things in my view, about joining such a new institution, is the opportunity to truly build something new, and to do so with relatively few constraints, at least in comparison with most established institutions of higher learning.

Our university begins its existence at a particularly momentous time in the history of the UAE—the need for young professionals with technical training, interpersonal skills, the ability to communicate, and to drive an innovation economy, could not be more acute. Here in Abu Dhabi, the multi-faceted 2030 Vision lays out very well a set of development priorities for the emirate, and spells out with unusual clarity the opportunity and obligation that higher education has to contribute to the success of this plan. We are dedicated to helping our students attain the skills and leadership qualities necessary to make this vision come to fruition, ultimately benefitting the UAE nation and its future generations as a united whole.

I thought it might be helpful to you to know a bit about me, and where I come from in assuming the leadership of our university. I am by training a mechanical engineer, having studied as an undergraduate in my home state of Oregon (in the western United States) and doing my graduate work at Stanford University in California. My research field is computational mechanics, which involves development of engineering simulation methods and computational tools used in all fields of engineering to model the response of solids, structures and fluids in a wide variety of applications. Modern computer software enables the modern engineer to test how a part or component might work in practice, without having to actually build that part and subject it to expensive (and sometimes, impractical) testing. My students and I develop such advanced simulation tools.

Working in this field requires a combination of applied mathematics, computer science, and elements of applied mechanics common to most engineering disciplines, providing a foundation for one of my core beliefs: that cutting edge research most often requires professionals to be broadly trained, and to have experience working in teams with colleagues trained in many different fields, not just their own.

This commitment to interdisciplinarity is a must for the modern research university, and one of the foundational principles we are establishing at Khalifa.

My professional career has included time at Boeing, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories, and I spent 18 years as a faculty member at Duke University in North Carolina before joining Khalifa. I’ve had academic appointments in three fields of engineering (civil, biomedical, and mechanical), and have served as an academic dean and as a department chair. As an academic dean in particular, I was responsible for the educations of about 2000 undergraduate and post-graduate students, and as a result of this service, have familiarity with the issues often of concern to students, both inside the classroom and outside. It is my intention to bring both my own and my world-leading colleagues' broad experience to bear in this determination to create a holistic teaching environment that prepares well-rounded technical leaders of tomorrow; individuals who are not just experts in a specialty field but who see 'the bigger picture' and keep this in mind as they identify problems, consider approaches to resolution of these problems, and implement solutions to them.

39 years and 10 days ago this country was founded on a deep vision of the future. A vision that was founded on the principles of optimizing the resources within the country to create sustainable development, principles of tolerance, respect and a desire to play a role on the world stage. In these 39 years the UAE has transformed itself into a world-class economy and society, an achievement it has taken most other countries centuries to achieve.

Likewise, at Khalifa we are building a world-class institution at an accelerated pace. We will do in years what it has taken similar institutions many decades to achieve, thanks to a meeting of minds between informed and passionate governmental leaders, world-class technical minds and some of the brightest future talent we have here in the UAE today. We will seek to help optimize the human potential we have within our own nation, building an engineering community that respects and engages with others locally and internationally in the pursuit of innovation.

Through Khalifa University we will export – not import but export! - Home-grown thinking that is going to make a difference to potentially millions of lives around the world and showcase what we here in the UAE can to do a global audience.

As I begin this role as president of your university, there are a few thoughts that immediately come to mind as I work with our administration, faculty, staff and students to shape our strategic directions:

First, the mandate we have from our government and our stakeholders, to combine excellence in both teaching and research, can and will be a distinguishing characteristic of Khalifa. Faculty members at Khalifa are expected to feature both top quality instruction in the classroom and demonstrated contribution to the body of knowledge. They will be expected to have high dedication to their students, and to teach these students creatively and with the most modern teaching methods available.

But it will also be very important that they work with graduate students, write papers for technical publication, interact with industry, and travel internationally to present their work. An important part of each student’s time at Khalifa, whether undergraduate or postgraduate, should be working with a faculty member at some stage on a research project.

This is part of what makes a college education special—working on an individual basis with a faculty member, and creating something nobody has ever created before, and through doing this we create a culture of innovation that will benefit the nation, the region and indeed the world.

Second, the newness of our institution, and our commitment to building quality graduate programs as well as undergraduate ones, gives us a distinctive opportunity to create an interdisciplinary learning and research culture for our students. In the long run, our students – and our nation – will be best-served by a broad-based holistic learning environment which equips them with the breadth of knowledge and skills necessary to lead.

We will have an emphasis, in both faculty hiring and in development of research initiatives, to address problems and areas of inquiry related to society’s ”grand challenges”: affordable energy, clean water, safe transportation, affordable health care, responsible stewardship of the environment, and so on. Students will see this in the seminar series we offer, the project work they do with their classmates, the internship opportunities we make available, and the research in which they become involved.

Learning how to “think big,” and collaborate with others having different technical training, is an important part of every student’s life as a university student and moreover will be a critical factor in individual future success.

Third, and simply put, our highest priority as faculty and staff will be to place our students first. This recognizes the undeniable fact that in the long run, our success will be measured primarily by the accomplishments of our students, and the level of leadership they assume in the nation and world. Attending university should be an immersive experience, and one that develops the whole person, both inside and outside the classroom.

Thus, we will commit ourselves not only to the academic success of our students, but also to their development as ethical professionals and responsible stewards of resources, dedicated to serving their fellow citizens with a sense of dedication, humility, joy and adventure.

Fourth, our community will be a truly international one, committed to the development of capacity for the UAE through a significant contingent of Emirati students, and yet benefiting from the diverse set of perspectives that a truly international community of faculty and students will bring. We will respect each other and seek to learn from our different cultures and points of view.

In the technical world, just as in the rest of life, better results are achieved when competing ideas are openly and respectfully advanced, debated, and tested for feasibility against objective and measurable standards. Preparing students for this world requires us to emulate this idea through the university environment we foster.

Fifth, we will encourage and reward faculty who seek to employ innovative teaching methods to deliver the most modern education possible. Recent decades have seen an explosion of research about how students learn, and we know that the most effective educational environments take advantage of active learning methods, group work centered about problem-based learning, and emerging information technology as opposed to traditional learning methods where the professor speaks at the chalkboard and the students passively take notes. Our goal at Khalifa will be to encourage consistent innovation in curricula and modes of instruction, and foster creativity in the way our faculty work with our students.

Sixth and finally, our commitment as administration and staff will be to lead the UAE and the Middle East in the quality of services we provide our faculty and students. To do this, we must be transparent in the way we operate, able to decentralize decision making processes such that the best ideas are implemented regardless of their source, and where every member of our community feels invested in our university and its accomplishments, and feels as though he or she has a voice in its future. To some extent, a good administration in a university is very much like a good referee or linesman in a football match—when its presence is not noticed, and the focus is on the players and the action, that usually indicates that a good job is being done. In a university, those players are the students and the faculty, and the staff and administration needs to enable them to do their best work.

We want to assure that our environment encourages creativity, a willingness to challenge accepted thinking and a certain amount of risk-taking – all critical aspects of a quality university.

So in closing, I’d like to share some thoughts about what an education in technology, science and medicine should represent—and dispel some misconceptions about what technical graduates might be like. Considering the field of engineering, charged with the employment of scientific principles to produce products, devices and solutions for the betterment of society, we are by definition a service-oriented profession. But many of the stereotypes of engineers—somewhat solitary, numbers-oriented, narrow in interest, dedicated to procedure, not especially outgoing or group-oriented—are in fact the opposite of what a successful engineer needs to be in today’s society.

Engineers today need to understand the world that they operate in, to be well-versed not only technologically but in business practices, politics, history, the arts, and even sociology and psychology, to successfully engage many problems. They need to work well in teams, both leading and following, and they need to be excellent communicators of their work to general audiences. In short, they need to have leadership qualities. Khalifa intends to distinguish itself through preparation of such leaders, who can lead the region not only technologically but in government, industry, and commercial innovation. We take this approach currently in designing our evolving programs in most fields of engineering, and intend to apply it in years ahead also as we look to creation of programs in medicine, the sciences, and management and logistics.

It is with great pleasure that I join the rest of you in dedicating myself to this effort, and a most worthy cause. I am confident that through hard work together, we will create a world-class university of which our graduates, students, and their families will be justifiably proud.

I offer my sincere congratulations to the graduates here and, in the spirit of this year's National Day, I say 'culo nah Khalifa'.

Shukran