National Academies picks Brown for prestigious Arab-American Frontiers program

  Learn more about the Arab-American Frontiers of Science, Engineering and Math Symposium:

Future leaders from the United States and Arab countries gather in Oman this December at the prestigious Arab-American Frontiers of Science, Engineering and Medicine Symposium.

The School of Civil and Environmental Engineering’s Joe Brown will be among them.

This is just the second Arab-American Frontiers program organized by the National Academies. It’s similar to the long-standing Kavli Frontiers of Science and the Frontiers of Engineering programs that bring together bright young minds to discuss the latest advances in their fields and new ideas.

“The symposium will be a great opportunity to network with colleagues working in the Middle East, where water scarcity is driving innovation,” Brown said. “I'll be presenting a new study on the microbial safety of water re-use, and hopefully identifying opportunities for collaborative research with others in the region.

“I'm honored to have been selected.”

Participants are all between the ages of 30 and 45. They’ll come from the United States and 21 Arab League countries. And key among the selection criteria: they must show the potential to be a future leader in science, engineering or medicine.

The meeting is designed to explore work in global food security, water reuse and desalination, new methods of accessing energy resources, and environmental regulators of cancer, but organizers said participants come from a broad range fields. They said that often fosters interesting cross-disciplinary conversations and research collaborations.

Brown is the fourth CEE faculty member invited to a Frontiers symposium in the last year: Kostas Konstantinidis attended the Kavli Frontiers of Science in the spring; Laurie Garrow and Kimberly Kurtis attended the Frontiers of Engineering program earlier this fall.