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CEO, EFE - Egypt

Ms Ahmed is at the helm of EFE-(Education for Employment) Egypt which helps create models of practical training, in partnership with employers and educational institutions, that produce job-ready graduates. Ms.Ahmed has worked for over 18 years in educational management, planning, and delivery, holding positions at AMIDEAST, the American University in Cairo, the Fulbright Commission, and the Arab Academy for Science and Technology. Additionally, she has held consulting positions with USAID, Community and Institutional Development, and Logic Consulting. Ms. Ahmed holds a Master's degree in Education and International Development from the Institute of Education, University of London, a Master's degree in Teaching English as a Foreign Language from the American University in Cairo, and a Bachelor's degree in English from the University of Alexandria, Egypt.

President, Khalifa University of Science, Technology and Research

Tod A. Laursen is the President of Khalifa University of Science, Technology and Research , in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Prior to becoming President of Khalifa University, Dr. Laursen was Professor and Chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Duke University (USA). While at Duke he also held academic appointments in civil engineering and biomedical engineering, and served as Senior Associate Dean for Education in Engineering from 2003-2008. In the latter capacity, he had oversight responsibility for all undergraduate and graduate engineering programs at Duke University, representing a student body of nearly 2000.

Dr. Laursen gained his PhD and MS postgraduate degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University and a BS in the same subject from Oregon State University. He specializes in computational mechanics, a subfield of engineering mechanics concerned with development of new computational algorithms and tools used by engineers to analyze mechanical and structural systems. He has published over 100 refereed journal articles, conference papers, book chapters, and abstracts in this field, as well as authoring or co-editing two books. His particular focus is development of methods to analyze contact, impact and frictional phenomena, in highly nonlinear and complex systems.

He is a Fellow of both the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the International Association of Computational Mechanics, and belongs also to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Society for Engineering Education, the United States Association for Computational Mechanics, and Tau Beta Pi. He served as an at-large member of the Executive Committee for the United States Association for Computational Mechanics between 2007 and 2010, and has served on the scientific advisory committees of several prominent national and international congresses in computational mechanics.

President, American University of Afghanistan

Dr. C. Michael Smith is an accomplished educational leader in the United States and internationally, he has held executive positions in international universities and accrediting agencies. In August 2009 he was appointed the President of the American University of Afghanistan, the first private nonprofit university in the country. Under his leadership, AUAF has received growing recognition as Afghanistan's premier higher education institution.

From 2005-2009, Dr Smith served as President of the American University of Nigeria, during that time the university grew from 124 to 1200 students. From 2002-2005, Dr. Smith was Director of the Commission for Academic Accreditation in the United Arab Emirates, where he advised the UAE Minister of Higher Education and also directed a highly praised review of academic programs.

In the United States, Dr. Smith served as President of the Hillsborough Education Foundation in Florida and CEO of the Philadelphia Education Fund. In these capacities, he raised more than $40 million in support of education. Other prominent roles held by Dr Smith include the Director for Planning and Assessment at the South Carolina Commission on Higher Education (1996-2001) and Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs at Winthrop University(1982-90), where he was Acting President from 1988-89.

Dr. Smith is a graduate of the Institute for Educational Management at Harvard University and holds a Ph.D. in British and American Literature from the University of North Carolina.

Dean of Mathematical and Computer Sciences and Engineering, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)

World renowned computational mathematician David E. Keyes is the founding Dean of the Division of Mathematical and Computer Sciences and Engineering at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, having come to KAUST from the Fu Foundation Chair of Applied Mathematics at Columbia University. A pioneer in the application of high performance computing to problems in engineering and applied physics, Keyes has been awarded the Gordon Bell Prize of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Sidney Fernbach Award of the IEEE Computer Society. The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) recently awarded Keyes its Prize for Distinguished Service to the Profession for his leadership and long-term advocacy of high performance computing in computational science and engineering, embodied in many reports to federal agencies of the USA.  He has directed several multi-institutional projects in scientific software infrastructure for the US National Science Foundation and Department of Energy and is the Director of KAUST’s strategic initiative in Extreme Computing.

With a BSE from Princeton and PhD from Harvard, Keyes taught for eight years at Yale, prior to joining Old Dominion University and the Institute for Computer Applications in Science & Engineering (ICASE) at the NASA Langley Research Center in 1993.  He has consulted at the national laboratories of the US for 25 years and directed the Institute for Scientific Computing Research (ISCR) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for nine years. Author or co-author of over 100 publications, Keyes is currently co-editor of the Computational Science & Engineering book series of SIAM and of Springer-Verlag.

Senior Vice President, Strategy & Portfolio Management, SunGard Higher Education

Dave Becker is responsible for ensuring that the strategy and solutions for finance, human resources and student services deliver what the company's higher education customers need to be successful. Mr. Becker has been with SunGard since 1997.
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Before joining the product management team, Mr. Becker was general manager of sales support where he traveled extensively to provide more than 200 product demonstrations for institutions evaluating Banner Finance and HR.

Prior to SunGard, Dave worked with Coopers and Lybrand as an auditor, specializing in higher education. Dave graduated cum laude from Penn State University, and is a certified public accountant.

Student, University of Wollongong in Dubai

Milan Sindhav is a 3rd year student at the University of Wollongong in Dubai. He is pursuing a Bachelors of Information Technology majoring in Management Information Systems. In addition to achieving overall High Distinction grades during his time at UOWD, Milan is also the president of the UOWD Public Speaking Club. Milan has taken an active role in his family shipping and logistics business and in his free time enjoys peer mentoring, travel, cars and photography.