“Egypt now suffers from water scarcity because there are 10 countries that share the Nile river and Egypt is the last on the stream.
Once she finished high school, her parents encouraged her to attend Cairo University, where they had first met.
Mohamed and Bakinam also met at Cairo University, where they were studying civil engineering.
“I was very interested in water, because in Egypt water can be scarce.
When Mohamed told Bakinam’s father that he wanted to marry her, her father said he could not do it until he had a master’s degree.
At the same time, Bakinam was finishing her master’s degree in groundwater from Cairo while she was living in the U.S., contacting her advisers online in Egypt.
We were afraid of the moving process, but since we trusted Dr. Goodall we knew that he will do what is best for us, so we didn’t hesitate to join him.” Now that they successfully defended their dissertations, they will remain working at UVA with Goodall as post-doctoral students, contributing to his research at the Environmental Resilience Institute, which uses collaborative research to address urgent social environmental issues, and the Link Lab, which uses collaboration to explore cyber-physical systems, such as body sensors, smart houses and intelligent transportation systems.
“Mohamed wants to speed up computer models to make them run more quickly for real-time decision support applications, and Bakinam is working on how to make the models more transparent and repeatable so they can be trusted by stakeholders.” Mohamed’s goal is to create a program that takes weather data and forecasts flooding.
Bakinam, who became more proficient in computer science through her Ph.D. studies, has been researching ways of making large metadata hydrologic models reproducible for other researchers and stakeholders.
He said he is very happy with academia in America, where his research can be published and shared with other researchers, who can use it in their work and possibly build on it.