 Hello to everyone. My name is Nidal Gesoum. 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. 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. There are reasons why I think young people should be interested in space science and space technology, space industry. First of all, space has become an integral part of our lives. Now we do not live without satellites, we cannot live without satellites. Whether for telecommunication, all the TV channels that we receive, the navigation, for example GPS, now we can't go anywhere if we don't have GPS, remote sensing. All kinds of activities, even sometimes when there is a problem that needs some intervention, we need the space technology to pinpoint the location of a person or a vehicle or something. So space has become an integral part of our lives. In addition to this, space has shown us that there are an infinite number of avenues where people can do research, can do research and development, can innovate, can integrate things that we have learned from Earth to space and from space to Earth. Everything that we have done here on Earth has been applied to space. And actually a lot of the things that we have been doing here on Earth started from space because we needed to develop, for example, lightweight laptops. We needed to develop water filtering techniques because we need to filter the water and recycle the water when we are in space. We can't keep on bringing water from somewhere. All kinds of health devices, how we monitor our hearts, how we monitor our health, medical aspects. A lot of things that were initially developed for space and for space venues, for space travel, for the space station, for travel to the moon, etc., have now become standard applied devices and techniques here on Earth. Plus, space, I always tell people, offers the fascination of discovering a new world, a new frontier. And youngsters are always fascinating, want to discover something new, want to go somewhere, you know, as Star Trek used to say, where no one has ever been before or discovered new places. And so for all these reasons, I think space offers an exciting and very promising aspect or venue for youngsters to implement their creativity, their interests, their discoveries and every skill that they have learned at school.