Strategic Priorities

Students at Texas A&M at Qatar and other partner universities have the unique ability to cross register for courses in the other partner universities. Students can explore business and entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, understand the media landscape at Northwestern University in Qatar, take a course on art history at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar and a course in the geopolitics of energy industry in Georgetown University in Qatar. This experience is unique to Qatar Foundation’s flagship Education City model. 

We also work closely with Hamad Bin Khalifa University’s Computer Engineering Program to offer courses and labs at Texas A&M at Qatar for their students, as well as, aligning course schedules to encourage more cross-registration.

For more information on cross registration, click here. 

Texas A&M at Qatar’s Center for Teaching and Learning is a hub of resources and activities for students and faculty alike. Amidst the 2020 pandemic, CTL hosted interactive workshops related to leadership for students across Education City to attend and connect virtually with their peers. CTL also organizes the Invent for the Planet (IFTP) competition at Qatar which often sees students from other universities participating. In IFTP 2020, we had students from CMU-Q, GU-Q and NU-Q join teams of Aggies.

CTL also issues a grant for projects on transformative educational experiences (TEE) which focus especially on multiversity projects. One successful project was a partnership between Texas A&M at Qatar and NU-Q, exploring meaningful undergraduate writing projects in Education City.

The CTL is also a driving force behind the Education City-wide Qatar Teaching and Learning Forum, an initiative designed to promote conversations about pedagogy. The forum hosted several activities this year featuring or led by Texas A&M at Qatar’s faculty.

Texas A&M at Qatar is currently working with CMU-Q to design and approve a joint minor in entrepreneurship where students would take a mix of courses at both universities. The program is expected to launch in Fall 2021. Three other joint minors have been identified for the involved universities to start working on: Natural Gas, Biomedical Engineering, and International Culture. In 2017, faculty from Texas A&M and HBKU began working together to create a dual Ph.D. program where graduates of the program would receive two doctorate degrees: one in chemical engineering from Texas A&M University and the other from HBKU in either Sustainable Energy or Sustainable Environment.

Texas A&M at Qatar faculty participate in several activities with the faculty from the partner universities, even creating and offering courses relevant for students at other universities. For instance, in the Spring and Fall of 2020, Dr. Stylianos Tzortzakis developed a new course for GU-Q students on “Physics for World Leaders.” Similarly, Dr. Othmane Bouhali will offer another course for GU-Q students on “Physics for Peace and Development" in Spring 2021. Often our faculty will also invite their fellow academics from the partner universities to share their expertise with our Aggies as guest speakers and lecturers and — vice versa — visit the partner universities to share their experiences.

Additionally, in 2018, our faculty participated in the QF Teaching Week — a cross-university event that provided a platform for Education City faculty to discuss and share innovative teaching and learning practices.

As the leader in the Education City multiversity cooperation, the Texas A&M at Qatar's Women’s Faculty Forum regularly collaborates with faculty and staff from other universities in the QF community, including the Georgetown Women’s Alliance. They have held networking lunches with faculty from GU-Q, NU-Q, VCUarts Qatar, CMU-Q, and Sidra Medicine to allow women to partner on projects and research. The WFF has also held professional development panels on topics especially relevant to female faculty, staff, and students: the leadership panel in Fall 2020 brought together the female deans in Education City for the very first time. The WFF continues to expand interfacing with others in Education City with book clubs, panel discussions, and International Women’s Day celebrations.

We host one of the most powerful high-performance computing facilities in the Middle East and a virtual reality system with the mission of fostering world class computational research at Texas A&M at Qatar, Education City, and Qatar as a whole. A large number of computational scientists in diverse topics such as Materials Science, Computational Biology, Data Analytics and Machine Learning at Education City are supported through our facilities. We also organize annually the EC-wide competitions and short courses to support projects and provide opportunities for professional development.

Faculty at Texas A&M at Qatar are part of supervising and examining committees for HBKU’s doctoral candidates. Our faculty also collaborate with their fellow academics in other partner universities for various Qatar National Research Fund projects. Current active projects include collaborations with HBKU, Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar, CMU-Q and VCUarts Qatar.

Texas A&M at Qatar took the initiative to form Education City-wide sport teams for both men and women’s soccer and basketball teams to participate in an international university tournament in Athens, Greece in March 2020. The tournament was canceled due to COVID-19.

Since 2017 the Texas A&M at Qatar library has coordinated a semi-monthly lunch meeting between librarians from all of the major libraries in Education City, including Qatar National Library. This meeting is used to discuss best practices, EC related news and events, and the current state of the EC libraries as a whole. It also fosters a sense of comradery and teamwork among the information specialists at the various universities and provides an avenue for seeking outside assistance and guidance for information and library related issues. It has facilitated collaboration, cooperation, and a spirit of community among EC's library professionals. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this meeting moved online and has served as a means to keep the libraries connected and engaged with each other throughout the crisis.

The library also coordinates borrowing and lending of materials throughout EC and beyond with its interlibrary loan program, allowing students and faculty access to a greater range of material from other libraries.

Texas A&M at Qatar’s Career Services staff frequently take the lead in partnering with fellow universities to host and engage students in various networking opportunities such as a virtual career panel on navigating the job market during the COVID-19 pandemic in Spring 2020 and a virtual career fair in Fall 2020. Texas A&M at Qatar collaborated with CMU-Q, NU-Q, GU-Q and VCUarts Qatar in both events.

For more information about our Career Services Office and their events, click here.

Not only do our STEM experts work with partner universities — such as CMU-Q for the 2020/2021 International Conrad Challenge — but they also collaborate with the pre-university education (PUE) schools’ students and teachers. In 2020, we hosted Qatar Academy for Science and Technology teachers for workshops that introduced them to engineering programs, such as LEGO EV3 robotics and indoor remote-controlled blimps. We also offered teacher professional development workshops that included courses from the LEGO Education Academy, as well as, offering hands-on lab safety training to PUE teachers. 

We also work with other universities to offer continuing education and professional development opportunities to industry partners in Qatar. In 2018, we worked with HBKU’s Executive Education Center to offer a new Fundamentals of Cybersecurity certificate program that explored concepts behind modern cryptographic systems and how they can be employed to secure data and private communications.

To check out some of our other continuing education programs, click here.