 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. So when I was a kid I was always interested in nature here on Earth and in the sky. So what are these things and what is happening? I always wanted to understand how and why. And so slowly I started to gravitate toward physics because physics was a science that explained all kinds of phenomena, whether with some things that we see around us or some things that we do not see like nuclear physics, like radiation. There's all kinds of phenomena that we do not see that physics is able to explain and predict and show us even some applications of. Moreover, I loved physics from the beginning because physics was a rigorous science. I felt like there are equations, there's some mathematics, there's some calculations, there's some measurements, experiments, there's some simulations that you can do. So you have confidence in what you are finding. So it's not just some idea, somebody is proposing an idea or a theory or a hypothesis. There was a rigorous process to finding truths and results about the world around us. And I loved astrophysics and I turned into astrophysics or turned to astrophysics because astrophysics was really the application of this physics, which I just said was this rigorous science that can uncover how things work, applied to space, to the cosmos, starting from the moon and the sun to going to the solar system and then stars and then galaxies and then objects that we have never seen or imagined, such as black holes and neutron stars and things like that. So there is this fascination but at the same time it's not just sort of science fiction, as much as I love science fiction. It is real science applied to the various corners of the universe. So astrophysics for me was the best field because it married all of these aspects of rigorous science and fascination of discovering the unknown.