Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence

21/08/2026

This week, MBZUAI welcomed 400+ new students from over 50 countries, pushing total enrolment past 900. Among the highlights of the incoming class:

First-ever cohorts in Computational Biology & HCI
33% of grad students from top-100 global universities
40+ PhD students returning after their Master’s here
Emirati students are the largest nationality group, with women making up over half

Alongside this, our faculty continues to grow in caliber, 24 new researchers have joined since January, bringing the total to 140, including recipients of the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award, MacArthur Fellowship, and Leibniz Prize.

Read more about the new academic year: https://mbzuai.ac.ae/news/mbzuai-opens-the-2026-27-academic-year-with-first-cohorts-in-computational-biology-and-human-computer-interaction/

13/08/2026

In Nature, MBZUAI's scientists Le Song, Professor of Machine Learning, Eran Segal, Dean of the Biological and Life Sciences Division, and Eric Xing, President and University Professor, lay out their vision for an AI-Driven Digital Organism (AIDO): a system of integrated multiscale foundation models, built to be modular, connectable, and holistic, reflecting biology's own scales, connectedness, and complexity.
The result, they write, is a safe, affordable and high-throughput alternative platform for predicting, simulating and programming biology at all levels, and the goal is to help us better decode and improve life.
Watch the short explainer to see how it works.
Read the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-026-04595-0

13/08/2026

Aerospace engineers test a plane on computers thousands of times before one gets built. Published today in Nature, our scientists shared a blueprint for giving biologists the same power.

With "How to Build an AI-Driven Digital Organism,” MBZUAI's Le Song, Professor of Machine Learning, Eran Segal, Dean of the Biological and Life Sciences Division, and Eric Xing, President and University Professor, lay out how to connect AI foundation models of DNA, RNA, proteins, cells, tissues, and whole organisms into a single simulator, where a change at one level plays out through the others.

Read the paper:

Manipulating biology in the physical world is complex; the authors envision an AI-driven digital organism—a system of integrated multiscale foundation models—detailing how to construct and use such a model to advance biological and medical research.

30/06/2026

Professor Éric Moulines is the inaugural Dean of MBZUAI’s Division of Computing and Mathematical Sciences.

Throughout his career he has worked on questions most people never think to ask - the mathematical foundations that make machine learning work at all: how algorithms learn reliably from uncertainty, how randomness can be tamed into principled inference, and how the mathematics of probability underpins everything from signal processing to the large-scale AI systems being built today.

A Fellow of the IMS, an elected member of the French Academy of Sciences, and recipient of the CNRS Silver Medal - one of the most prestigious scientific distinctions in France -, Professor Éric is now bringing that body of work to bear on the next generation of AI systems. At MBZUAI, he is building the computational and mathematical bedrock on which the university’s next era of research will stand.

“We’re building the new fundamentals of what can be done with AI in the future. This is only possible at a university like MBZUAI in Abu Dhabi.” he says.

Read more: https://mbzuai.ac.ae/news/foundational-research-in-the-age-of-ai/

الدكتور إريك مولين هو أول عميد لقسم علوم الحوسبة والرياضيات في جامعة محمد بن زايد للذكاء الاصطناعي.

خلال مسيرته المهنية، تركّز عمله على الإجابة عن أسئلةٍ قد لا تكون ضمن اهتمامات الكثيرين. ومن أهمها الأسس النظرية التي تجعل التعلّم الآلي ممكناً: كيف تتعلّم الخوارزميات بدقّة رغم حالة عدم اليقين، وكيف يمكن تحويل العشوائية إلى نتائجٍ قائمة على أسس علمية، وكيف تُشكّل رياضيات الاحتمالات الركيزة لمعالجة الإشارات الإحصائية وأنظمة الذكاء الاصطناعي التي يتم تطويرها اليوم.

هو زميل في الرابطة الأوروبية لمعالجة الإشارات، وزميل في معهد الإحصاء الرياضي، وعضو منتخب في الأكاديمية الفرنسية للعلوم. حصل على الميدالية الفضية من المركز الوطني الفرنسي للبحث العلمي، وهي واحدة من أرفع الجوائز العلمية في فرنسا. يعمل الدكتور مولين اليوم على توظيف خبرته العلمية الكبيرة لصياغة المفاهيم والنظريات التي ستقود الجيل المقبل من أنظمة الذكاء الاصطناعي. ويواصل ضمن عمله في جامعة محمد بن زايد للذكاء الاصطناعي، على بناء الأسس الحاسوبية والرياضية التي ستدعم أبحاث الجامعة في المستقبل.

من أقواله، "نعمل على بناء الأسس العلمية الجديدة التي ستحدد ما يمكن للذكاء الاصطناعي تحقيقه في المستقبل. وهذا النوع من العمل لا يمكن تحقيقه إلا في جامعة مثل جامعة محمد بن زايد للذكاء الاصطناعي في أبوظبي."

للمزيد: https://mbzuai.ac.ae/ar/news/%d8%a5%d8%b1%d9%8a%d9%83-%d9%85%d9%88%d9%84%d9%8a%d9%86-%d8%a8%d9%86%d8%a7%d8%a1-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%a3%d8%b3%d8%b3-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%b9%d9%84%d9%85%d9%8a%d8%a9-%d9%84%d8%b9%d8%b5%d8%b1-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%b0

30/06/2026

Professor Eran Segal is the inaugural Dean of MBZUAI's Division of Biological and Life Sciences.

A 2026 Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology, recipient of the Overton Prize, and with over 250 publications and 90,000 citations to his name, Professor Eran has spent his career at the boundary where AI meets human biology. His research has shown that blood glucose responses to identical foods vary dramatically between individuals, that the microbiome plays a key role in human health and disease, and that personalized medicine built on large-scale human cohort data is not a future ambition but a present possibility.

At MBZUAI, he is building a division that has what few researchers around the world have access to: the high-quality human health data, the team, and the infrastructure to discover.

"We’re going to tackle the toughest open questions at the intersection of AI and human biology. There has never been a better moment for our research as our faculty lead efforts to model complex biological systems, uncover the genetic and epidemiological drivers of disease, and harness data at scale for clinical and public health impact,” he says.

Read more: https://mbzuai.ac.ae/news/what-it-takes-to-study-human-biology-at-scale/

البروفيسور إيرَن سيغال هو أول عميد لقسم العلوم الحيوية والحياتية في جامعة محمد بن زايد للذكاء الاصطناعي.

حائز على زمالة الجمعية الدولية لعلم الأحياء الحاسوبي لعام 2026، والفائز بجائزة أوفرتون، وله أكثر من 250 بحثاً علمياً و90 ألف استشهاد علمي. كرّس البروفيسور سيغال مسيرته المهنية للعمل على تعزيز توظيف الذكاء الاصطناعي في بيولوجيا الإنسان. وقد كشفت أبحاثه أن استجابة مستويات السكر في الدم للأطعمة تختلف بشكل كبير بين الأفراد، وأن الميكروبيوم له دور أساسي في صحة الإنسان وظهور الأمراض. كما أكد أن الطب الشخصي المعتمد على البيانات لم يعد مجرد فكرة مستقبلية، بل أصبح اليوم واقعاً ممكناً.

يعمل البروفيسور في جامعة محمد بن زايد للذكاء الاصطناعي على بناء قسم بحثي متقدم، يضم موارد ليست متوفرة إلا لعددٍ محدود من الباحثين حول العالم. تشمل هذه الموارد بيانات بيولوجية بشرية عالية الجودة، وفريق بحث علمي، وبنية تحتية متقدمة تدعم الاكتشافات العلمية.

من أبرز أقواله: "نسعى إلى معالجة أكثر الأسئلة العلمية تعقيداً حول دور الذكاء الاصطناعي في تطوير بيولوجيا الإنسان. واليوم باتت الظروف مهيأة أكثر من أي وقت مضى لدفع أبحاثنا إلى الأمام، إذ يعمل أعضاء هيئتنا الأكاديمية على تطوير نماذج الأنظمة البيولوجية المعقدة، وكشف العوامل الجينية والوبائية المسببة للأمراض، وتسخير البيانات واسعة النطاق لتحقيق أثر ملموس في العيادات السريرية والصحة العامة."

للمزيد: https://mbzuai.ac.ae/ar/news/%d9%83%d9%8a%d9%81-%d8%aa%d8%b3%d8%a7%d8%b9%d8%af-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%a8%d9%8a%d8%a7%d9%86%d8%a7%d8%aa-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%b6%d8%ae%d9%85%d8%a9-%d9%88%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%b0%d9%83%d8%a7%d8%a1-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%a7

13/06/2026

منح صاحب السمو الشيخ محمد بن زايد آل نهيان، رئيس دولة الإمارات العربية المتحدة، حفظه الله، مارتن ل. إيدلمان، عضو مجلس أمناء جامعة محمد بن زايد للذكاء الاصطناعي والخبير القانوني والمستشار الدولي، "وسام الاتحاد"، تقديراً لدوره في تعزيز شراكات دولة الإمارات الاستراتيجية والعالمية ودعم رؤيتها للتنمية الاقتصادية.

نبارك لمارتن على هذا التكريم.

UAE President His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan has awarded the Order of the Union to MBZUAI’s Board of Trustees member Martin L Edelman, the distinguished legal expert and international advisor, in recognition of his role in advancing the UAE's global strategic partnerships and supporting its economic development vision.

Congratulations, Martin.

09/06/2026

How can AI research help shape a path in aerospace engineering? For Huanying “Joy” Yeh, it landed her at SpaceX, where she’s an electrical engineer.

A member of MBZUAI’s Undergraduate Research Internship Program (UGRIP) 2024 cohort, she explored how LLMs can be prompted to solve Olympiad linguistics problems, developing the problem-solving and systems thinking that translates across engineering disciplines, while building skills in project management and cross-team collaboration.

Through UGRIP, Joy saw how AI intersects with aerospace, computer science, and complex engineering systems.

Stay tuned for more stories from our past UGRIP participants and updates from the 2026 cohort.

Learn more: https://mbzuai.ac.ae/study/

04/06/2026

At CVPR 2026, MBZUAI researchers will present work addressing core challenges in computer vision and multimodal AI: how models reason over long videos, how systems generalise with limited labels, how AI agents can support remote sensing, and how the field should approach watermarking in generative media.

From the many papers accepted, we're spotlighting a selection of oral and highlight papers which focus on visual reasoning, trustworthy media, domain adaptation, remote sensing, and efficient foundation-model methods.

04/06/2026

Genetics explains only a fraction of why people get sick. Environment, lifestyle, and the epigenome explain far more. And unlike DNA, those factors can change.
A new framework published in Nature Genetics sets out how the UAE is uniquely positioned to turn that insight into population-scale disease prevention.

The paper was co-authored by MBZUAI's:
Professor Eran Segal - Dean of the Biological and Life Sciences Division, and Professor of Computational Biology;
Professor Eduardo Beltrame - Assistant Professor of Computational Biology;
Professor Shahrukh Hashmi- Adjunct Professor of Personalized Medicine, and Director of Research, Department of Health Abu Dhabi (DoH);
Professor Andrew Feinberg - Visiting Scholar, MBZUAI, Director of the Center for Epigenetics, Chief of the Division of Molecular Medicine in the Department of Medicine, and the King Fahd Professor of Medicine, Oncology, Molecular Biology, and Genetics in the School of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University.

Read more 👉 https://mbzuai.ac.ae/news/how-population-scale-epigenetics-could-transform-healthcare-in-the-uae/

Link to paper here 👉 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-026-02630-x.epdf?sharing_token=5R1MYee2S7tlE8VX2-dlU9RgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0PVd6ngVdcJ7rYjlIc6xgP7_RMsBCZZ_cyTPDJFkvgpe7bGT9Op9SdIsDe1GCJsFLTJK7h7wRvi8JUu5C0KBq4qyRbF94KFoy-wb-bLjvavF5umMGCOkt_zlQBeTN36YE0%3D

29/05/2026

MBZUAI President and University Professor Eric Xing is speaking today at 1:45 PM EST at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Symposium.
His talk, “A World Model of the Virtual Cell,” is part of the “Scientific Agents and Multimodal Models” session and introduces a new AI architecture for biological simulation, and the team’s first implementation of a Virtual Cell World Model (VCWM).

Join via Zoom (registration required): https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_1aC3ZXs8TM-GUdP7JiNJAg

Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: 90th Symposium: AI in Biology . After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar.