Profiles

Atif Shamim received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Carleton University, Canada, in 2004 and 2009, respectively. He was an NSERC Alexander Graham Bell Graduate Scholar at Carleton University from 2007 to 2009 and an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow from 2009 to 2010 at the Royal Military College Canada and KAUST.

In 2006, he joined the VTT Micro-Modules Research Center (Oulu, Finland) as an invited researcher. In August 2010, he joined the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Program at KAUST, where he is currently a full professor, chair of the ECE Program, and principal investigator of the IMPACTS Lab.

His research work has earned numerous awards, including Best Paper Awards at IEEE ICMAC 2021, IEEE IMS 2016, IEEE MECAP 2016, and IEEE EuWiT 2008. He also received first prize in the IEEE IMS 2019 3MT Competition, the IEEE AP-S Design Competition 2022, and second prize in the IEEE IMS Design Competition 2024. Additionally, he was recognized with finalist or honorable mention awards in several prestigious competitions, including the IEEE AP-S Design Competition 2020 and the R.W.P. King Prize for journal papers in IEEE TAP 2017 and 2020. He has been selected as a Distinguished Lecturer for IEEE AP-S (2022–2024).

In addition to his research accolades, Professor Shamim’s work has been recognized for its broader impact across innovation, industry and entrepreneurship. He received the King’s Prize for the Best Innovation of the Year (2018) for his work on sensors for the oil industry. In 2008, he was honored with the Ottawa Centre of Research Innovation (OCRI) Researcher of the Year Award in Canada. His innovative Wireless Dosimeter earned the ITAC SMC Award at the Canadian Microelectronics Corporation TEXPO in 2007. He has also won several business-related honors, including first prize in Canada’s National Business Plan Competition and the OCRI Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2010.

Professor Shamim has been actively involved in contributing to the IEEE community through various technical, editorial, and leadership roles. He is a Fellow of IEEE and founded the first IEEE AP/MTT chapter in Saudi Arabia (2013). He served on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (2013–2019), as a Guest Editor for an IEEE AWPL Special Issue (2019), and as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Journal of Electromagnetics, RF and Microwaves in Medicine and Biology (2020–2024). He has also participated in several IEEE Technical Committees, including those on Antenna Measurements (AP-S), Microwave Controls (MTT-S 13), and Additive Manufacturing (CRFID). 

He currently chairs the IEEE AP-S Technical Committee on Wireless Communication and serves as Vice Chair of the IEEE AP-S MGA Committee.

Professor Shamim's research focuses on innovative antenna designs and their integration strategies with circuits and sensors for flexible and wearable wireless sensing systems through a combination of CMOS and additive manufacturing technologies. Shamim is particularly interested in developing wearable wireless sensor systems to measure physiological parameters in real time.

Specific research interests include:

• Antenna-on-Chip (AoC) design, integration and efficiency enhancement strategies
• Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS)
  Additive manufacturing (Inkjet, Screen, and 3D printing)
• Wearable and disposable wireless sensors realized through printing technologies
• Mechanically flexible RF electronics and sensing systems
• Reconfigurable microwave components (magnetically controlled)
• Phase Change Materials (PCM) for low cost RF and mm-Wave switching applications
• Terahertz plasmonics antennas and their characterization techniques
   

Professor Hakan Bagci is the Associate Dean for Students at the CEMSE Division and a faculty member in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) program at KAUST. He specializes in computational electromagnetics, focusing on time-domain integral equations, hybrid methods, and numerical solvers for complex electromagnetic interactions, with applications in photonic, optical, and electronic systems.

Professor Hakan Bagci received his Bachelor's in Electrical and Electronics Engineering ('01) from Bilkent University, Turkey. He obtained his Master's and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), U.S., in 2003 and 2007, respectively.

From 2001 to 2006, Bagci was a research assistant with the UIUC Center for Computational Electromagnetics and Electromagnetics Laboratory, U.S. From 2007 to 2009, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan's Radiation Laboratory, U.S.
Bagci arrived at KAUST in August 2009 as an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering. He was promoted to Associate Professor in the same program six years later.

In 2021, he was elevated as an Applied Computational Electromagnetics Society (ACES) Fellow for his "exceptional achievements in computational electromagnetics, including ACES publications, and extensive service to ACES." He is a Senior Member of the International Union of Radio Science (URSI) for his research achievements in the field of computational electromagnetics.

He is an Associate Editor for IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine (2019 to present), Associate Editor for IEEE Journal of Multiscale and Multiphysics Computational Techniques (2018 to present), and Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (2017 to present).

Professor Bagci’s research focuses on theoretical and applied aspects of the interdisciplinary field of computational electromagnetics (CEM). CEM fuses elements of electrical engineering, physics, applied mathematics and computational sciences to enable the numerical design and characterization of real-life electromagnetic, optical and photonic devices and systems.

The field of CEM complements and facilitates advances in other fields of electromagnetics, optics and photonics.

Bagci’s CEM research group is developing novel, efficient, accurate algorithms and numerical schemes for solving integral/differential forms of Maxwell equations—a set of four complicated equations that describe the world of electromagnetics.

Throughout his 30-year academic career, Professor Mohamed-Slim Alouini, an IEEE, OPTICA, and SPIE Fellow, has developed analytical and simulation tools for evaluating the performance of radio-frequency and optical wireless communication systems. He has also designed and optimized innovative technologies for emerging wireless networks.

Professor Alouini, a co-founder of KAUST's ECE program, inspires future engineers through his pioneering work in wireless communications. His integrated space-air-ground networks, spectrum sharing schemes, and optical wireless communication systems research shape connectivity's future and embody KAUST's scientific excellence and global impact.

Professor Alouini has published numerous conference and journal papers and co-authored the textbook Digital Communication over Fading Channels, published by Wiley Interscience. A former editor of IEEE Transactions on Communications and IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication, he also served as an editor for IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing and the Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing journal. He was also a series editor for the IEEE Communication Magazine's Optical Communication and Networks Special Series and the founding field chief editor for the Frontiers in Communications and Networks journal. He is now the Founding Editor-in-Chief for the Nature Partnership Journal (npj) on Wireless Technologies (since 2025) and an editor for the IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronics Systems (since 2022).

Professor Alouini has been an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Communication Society (2016-2017), the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society  (2018-2022), the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society (2023-2024), the IEEE Photonics Society (2025), and the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology (2026-Present).

In addition to diversity combining techniques and MIMO techniques, Professor Alouini is interested in multi-hop and cooperative communications, optical wireless communication systems, cognitive radio systems, green communication systems, underwater/maritime communication systems, and integrated ground-airborne-space networks for research.

Professor Alouini is actively working on addressing the uneven global distribution, access to, and use of information and communication technologies (ICT) by studying and developing new generations of aerial and space networks as a solution to provide connectivity to rural, low-income, disaster-prone, and/or hard-to-reach areas.

His KAUST Communication Theory Lab (CTL) investigates viable solutions to minimize ICT costs by (i) capitalizing on emerging and new solutions that operate within the unlicensed radio frequency spectrum and by (ii) deploying a variety of aerial and space-based networks.