Sharjah24 – WAM: Lt. General Sheikh Saif bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior, conferred degrees on 1,191 bachelor’s, Master’s and PhD students of Khalifa University of Science and Technology at a graduation ceremony, held under the patronage of President His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
Dignitaries, members of the University’s board of trustees, faculty and staff, including Professor Sir John O’Reilly, President, Dr. Arif Sultan Al Hammadi, Executive Vice-President, and Dr. Ahmed Al Shoaibi, Senior Vice-President, Academic and Student Affairs. The ceremony was also attended by graduates and members of their families.
Sheikh Saif congratulated the students on their graduation and wished them success for the future.
He emphasised that the wise directives of His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed have helped Khalifa University achieve prestigious international rankings. He praised the University’s various advancements in academics, research and technology innovations, especially being the only university from the UAE to be ranked among the top 200 universities in the world. He also commended the university’s consistent efforts towards achieving further milestones that has firmly cemented its position among the top institutions in the world.
H.H. Sheikh Saif offered his congratulations to the cohort of fresh graduates and hoped that with their newly acquired knowledge and expertise, they would play a truly critical role, contributing to the economic progress of the UAE, as well as in many regions across the world.
The ceremony celebrated the graduation of 1,191 students, 27 of which were PhD students, 270 Master’s and 894 Bachelors of Science, and Engineering programmes. The graduates included 490 male, and 701 female students. The number of UAE Nationals totaled 895, while international students numbered 296.
Moreover, demonstrating its status as a leading sustainability-based institution, the University launched the Khalifa University autonomous vehicle (AV) – the UAE’s first driverless 12-seater shuttle to transport students and staff around the Sas Al Nakhl Campus.
One of the first-ever AVs to be deployed in the UAE in a ‘mixed traffic mode’, the AV can drive on the road with other cars, while also providing a research and development platform to faculty and researchers at the Khalifa University Center for Robotics and Autonomous Systems (KU-CARS), to investigate autonomous driving in challenging scenarios.
During the ceremony, Hour Matar AlMadhaani, a Mechanical Engineering graduate, offered the graduate address.
Khalifa University is top-ranked in the UAE and among the top 10 out of 125 Arab institutions in the Times Higher Education (THE) Arab Universities Ranking for three consecutive years.
In the Nature Index 2021, Khalifa University ranked top in the UAE and second among Arab institutions in terms of research output with 22 research papers, only for the 1st May 2020 – 1st April 2021 period. In the 2023 QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) World University Rankings, Khalifa University is ranked among the top 200 universities (181) globally and top in the UAE.