 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. 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. One of the 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, 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. 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's 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. Well, the UAE has been investing major efforts and resources into space industry and space science. For the past 10 years or more, the UAE invested money into satellites, for example. So there were the DubaiSat1, DubaiSat2, YaSat and now they're preparing the KhalifaSat. So there was a lot of space technology and then in the last two years or so there has been this announcement of a Mars mission, a mission to Mars, the hope probe that is going to be sent in 2020, arriving over there in 2021. So the UAE has spent and has launched major efforts and major initiatives. Why should that be? People always ask why are we spending so much money into space, discovering things that do not have any application in our lives? Why should I invest in initiatives or in projects that are not solving direct world problems such as epidemics, such as famine, such as climate change problems and all kinds of real sort of day-to-day life problems. And I always say that first of all, there are a lot of applications to what we do in space to what we do here on Earth. So for example, the satellites that I mentioned, all of them have applications are actually are exclusively and solely targeting the Earth here. So we monitor what happens on the ground, if there is for example a sandstorm, if there is any planning for some project, how we're going to lay down the framework for building this or building that, the telecommunication, all of that is done by satellite and cannot be done otherwise. So even if we want to develop things here on Earth, we have no choice but to go to space and do things from space. Secondly, there are many unplanned applications to what things happen in space programs because space requires nanotechnology, requires atomic science, requires radiation science, requires chemistry, requires medicine. So all things that we need to develop in order to do space program. And as we develop these things, there are spin-offs as we call them, sort of side applications to what happens here on Earth. Thirdly, because that is the best field for innovation. If we want the UAE to be among the innovating nations, not just buying technology from somewhere, applying it, using it, but starting to innovate, the best field for innovation is when you launch projects into space because that requires engineering, it requires science, it requires project management, it requires all kinds of avenues and people face problems that they had not met before. That's when you are required to be creative and to become innovative. So if, as we understand and we are beginning to see, the UAE wants to make this quantum leap and be among the nations that develop new technologies, that participate in discoveries, etc., then I think the space venue is the best to be invested in.