Looking back at 2025

The schools committee of S4P organized another installment of the Palestinian Advanced Physics School (PAPS) this past summer. The week-long program, July 26-31, for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students focussed mainly on quantum physics and quantum technology, as 2025 marks the 100th year of quantum science.  

Unlike previous editions of the school held in Palestinian universities, this year’s edition was hosted at the University of Jordan. The ongoing genocide and current restrictions prevented it from being in the West Bank. About 50 students were able to attend in person, while another 5 students from Gaza attended on-line through Zoom. E-sims were provided for the remote students to help with internet accessibility.

When Prof. Dr. Shadi Albarqouni speaks about research, he does not begin with algorithms or publications. He begins with a question: What does the population need? That question has guided his research from Gaza to global medical AI, shaping a career marked by constraint, conviction, and an enduring sense of responsibility.

Born and raised in Saudi Arabia, Albarqouni moved with his family to Gaza during his teenage years. There, amid political instability, limited infrastructure, and chronic electricity shortages, he completed high school and earned both his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Islamic University of Gaza. These formative years would leave a lasting imprint on his scientific outlook.

Living under siege, where power cuts were part of daily life, he focused his early research on solar energy. His Master’s thesis addressed a concrete and urgent problem: how to optimize solar panel positioning to maximize energy output. The work was driven by necessity rather than abstraction and resulted in several early publications, an uncommon achievement under such conditions.

Beyond the classroom, Albarqouni worked in hospitals across Gaza, where he was directly exposed to the everyday realities faced by patients and healthcare workers. Limited access to medical equipment, shortages of specialized expertise, delays in diagnosis, and fragmented medical records were not abstract problems but daily obstacles with real consequences for patient care. These conditions underscored the urgent need for telemedicine and practical, technology-driven solutions capable of functioning despite severe resource constraints.

In response to these realities, and even before formally beginning his graduate studies, he initiated a project titled “Steps Towards Establishing a Telemedicine Center in Palestine.” The aim was to bridge the gap between patients and scarce medical specialists, particularly in fields such as histopathology. Working within these constraints gradually sharpened a question that would later become central to his research career: how to design computational and AI-based medical systems that remain reliable when data, infrastructure, and resources are limited.

Faced with limited opportunities for advanced research in Palestine, Albarqouni moved to Germany in 2012 to pursue a PhD at the Technical University of Munich. His decision was not driven solely by career advancement. Germany, he has said, represented a place where ideas are taken seriously; where long-term thinking, scientific rigor, and institutional support converge.

He has since remarked that if he were to make the decision again, he would still choose Germany. Its intellectual environment, combined with its relative proximity to Palestine, allowed him to remain connected to his roots while building an independent scientific career.

He completed his doctorate with summa cum laude honors, followed by research stays at leading institutions such as ETH Zurich and Imperial College London. These experiences positioned him at the forefront of machine learning and medical image analysis.

His trajectory accelerated with the award of a prestigious AI Young Investigator Group Leader grant, enabling him to establish his own research group in 2020. Since 2022, he has served as a tenure-track professor at the Medical Faculty of the University of Bonn.

Today, Shadi Albarqouni leads research at the intersection of artificial intelligence and medicine, with a strong emphasis on what he describes as Affordable AI. His work aims to ensure that advanced diagnostic technologies are not confined to well-funded hospitals in high-income countries

One focus of his research is the use of AI to enhance low-field MRI scans, allowing affordable and low-exposure imaging systems to achieve quality comparable to high-end machines. In settings with limited access to advanced equipment, such innovations can fundamentally reshape healthcare delivery.

Equally important is his attention to fairness and representation in medical AI. Albarqouni has shown that models trained exclusively on certain populations often perform poorly when applied elsewhere. His work in areas such as mammography highlights the ethical implications of biased datasets, and the responsibility researchers bear when deploying AI in clinical practice.

Albarqouni’s influence extends well beyond his laboratory. He is an active member of several international scientific networks, including the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), the Arab-German Young Academy, and the Global Young Academy, reflecting his commitment to global scientific cooperation and policy-relevant research.

He regularly serves on thesis committees and grant evaluation panels, organizes international conferences and workshops across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, and co-supervises students from Palestine, Tunisia, Jordan, and other countries in the region. Throughout his work, he has emphasized multidisciplinary training, particularly collaboration between engineers, clinicians, and data scientists.

With support from organizations such as DAAD, he has also organized educational initiatives focused on hands-on training in electronics and applied technologies—efforts aimed at building sustainable capacity rather than short-term visibility.

Despite his international standing, the war in Gaza remains a constant presence in Albarqouni’s life. For the past two years, his family has remained in Gaza City, and efforts to help them leave have been challenging.

Balancing teaching, research, and leadership responsibilities while following intermittent and delayed news from Gaza has been, in his words, “extremely challenging.” The distance is physical, but the sense of responsibility remains immediate.

Looking ahead, Albarqouni argues that the reconstruction of Gaza, and the broader future of Palestine, requires a coordinated, research-driven roadmap grounded in innovation rather than short-term fixes. He emphasizes the need to prioritize water security, healthcare, energy, and food systems -- areas where scientific solutions can directly support recovery and resilience.

He advocates for a top-down approach that brings together scientists in the diaspora with institutions and professionals on the ground, enabling knowledge transfer and the deployment of solutions suited to constrained and rapidly changing conditions. Such efforts, he stresses, require long-term government commitment, protection for scientific work, and realistic infrastructure planning tailored to post-war realities.

Talent, he insists, already exists. What Gaza and Palestine need now is coordination, continuity, and the political will to allow science and innovation to play a central role in rebuilding.

Prof. Dr. Shadi Albarqouni’s career reflects how lived experience can quietly shape scientific direction. His work demonstrates a sustained effort to align rigorous research with the realities that first drew him to science, maintaining a connection between global advances and local concerns.

In a research landscape often driven by abstraction and scale, his path suggests another possibility, one in which scientific progress remains attentive to context, responsibility, and human need.

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