 Hello to everyone. My name is Nidal Gassoum. I am professor of physics and astronomy at the American University of Sharjah here in the United Arab Emirates. I have done astrophysics research in many different parts of the world including having spent a couple of years at the NASA Research Center. I continue to do research here with colleagues from the UAE, from the Gulf, from Europe and from the US. And my most exciting activity is when I involve students to have them discover space, discover the cosmos and participate in research that can uncover new things in the world. While I have been interested in topics at the interface between science or modern science including astronomy but even broader than astronomy and Islam, religion in general but Islam in particular, for more than 20 years, for at least 25 years. Part of it is simply on practical grounds so being an astronomer I was always asked so can we determine Islamic events or Islamic dates, the start of Ramadan, the events of Eid, Hajj, etc. Can astronomy help determine this? Can we stop the disagreements that arise from time to time? So some of it was on practical grounds but some of it was also on more intellectual and philosophical grounds so when we learn more about the universe and about nature, whether it is from the Big Bang theory or the biological evolution theory or a number of other discoveries, how do we relate all of this to our religious upbringing and education, our faith, whether it is Islamic or other. And so I was always interested in this, reading, sometimes writing, some articles, giving a few talks here and there, etc. And for the past 10 years or so I started to become involved with the John Templeton Foundation in the US. The John Templeton Foundation supports research and activities initiatives that are in what they call the big questions. So they're not necessarily all religious questions but they are big questions as for example philosophical implications of cosmology or philosophical implications of the quantum world or of biological evolution, what does it mean, what does it imply for us and how to relate philosophy, religion, science, ethics, education, all of these topics. And so I submitted a grant to them that I wanted to be funded for three years to do a series of activities of different types, conducting workshops internationally. So we had one workshop here at the US, we had a workshop in Malaysia, we had a workshop in Jordan, we had one in Algeria, we had one in France, we had one in Morocco, we had one in London. So we had a number of workshops around the world where we met with students who were highly interested in these topics, gave them some lectures, interacted with them, gave them some topics to research themselves. Some of them ended up writing essays and publishing, some of them decided to do their PhD on them. So that was one line of trying to sort of spread this topic and this interest in an organized and academic manner. Another was to try to put together some videos that we did and we put on YouTube to address some of these topics. Some of them, there were two of them done by myself but there were a number of others that were done by other specialists. One biochemist, one cosmologist, one ethicist, one philosopher, one Islamic scholar, one historian. So we had a number of people do interviews such as this for 10 minutes or so to try to explain why their field and their viewpoint on that specific topic in relation to Islam was important and how people should view it and learn more about it. So there is a series of videos on that. There were a number of other activities such as an essay competition that we ran for the students internationally. We had a summer school in Paris for about 20 students from around the world. So there were a number of activities like this which we felt were very much needed and the students wherever we announced this, they responded very enthusiastically. We had dozens and dozens of essays submitted to us to review and tell us and can I join and please take me because we were selecting students to participate. So that project ended about a year or two ago after three successful years. Following that, I embarked on a little project on my own which was also recently supported by one of the affiliates of the Templeton Foundation and that is to write a short book, a short book that I have tentatively called The Young Muslim's Guide to Modern Science. So it is a small book addressed to high schoolers, maybe freshmen, university students. So they are at the age of about 15 to 18, 20, between 15 and 20. And they want to understand so how do I understand this modern science? What is it saying exactly? Just get the clearest and most correct information but also put it in the context of their Islamic background and education. So we don't want students to come and be lost in the science and then start to say, I don't see how this relates and or what I was told doesn't fit with this. So we don't want them to have two minds. So I've written this short book. I've pitched it to some publishers lately. Hopefully it will be published in the next few months. And that is also trying to help in the education arena with the young generation to try to give them some reference that they can read and benefit from and go back to, to try to make sense of all these things at the same time. In a nutshell, to summarize, my philosophy is what I call harmonization. So I try to harmonize between the religious teachings and education and the learning that we get from modern science without sacrificing one or the other. And how to put them together is not always obvious. And I am hoping to sort of present a template, a way to do it in an accessible and reasonable manner for the younger generation.