Emirati women comprise 54% of national student cohort at MBZUAI

Emirati women now comprise 54 percent of the national student intake at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) for the 2026-2027 academic year, according to data released on Sunday, 6 September. The figure marks a significant shift in the demographic of artificial intelligence research and development within the UAE. National Faculty and Research Leadership Dr Hanan Aldarmaki, the first Emirati and first woman to join the MBZUAI faculty in 2022, currently serves as the Director for the Center of Teaching and Learning and Assistant Professor of Natural Language Processing. Dr Aldarmaki, who holds a PhD in Computer Science from George Washington University and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, manages research focused on documenting spoken Emirati dialects through the Ramsa Lab initiative. The Ramsa Lab project is dedicated to the scientific documentation of the UAE’s intangible heritage, which is primarily transmitted orally. Dr Aldarmaki told the Emirates News Agency (WAM) that this work is essential for developing language technologies that accurately represent regional cultures and low-resource languages in global AI systems. New Postdoctoral Funding for Nationals To further expand the pipeline of local experts, MBZUAI recently launched the Ruwwad AI Scholars (RAIS) Postdoctoral Fellowship. This programme provides Emirati PhD graduates with a fully funded, two-year opportunity to conduct research at international institutions. The…