Sifr Prize names five winning research proposals for the Arab world
Sifr Prize honors Arab science essays on urgent regional challenges
- Publish date: Wednesday، 21 October 2026 Reading time: 4 min reads
The first edition received 156 submissions from 29 countries and awards US$5,000 in unrestricted cash prizes, alongside 16 honorable mentions.
21 October 2026
The Sifr Prize has announced the results of its first edition, recognizing five winning essays and 16 honorable mentions in response to a question: “What should exist for science and technology in the Arab world, but doesn’t?”
Entrants were asked to identify problems in the Arab world and explain the scientific or engineering research needed to solve them. It was open to anyone and received 156 submissions from 130 people in 29 countries, ranging from high-school students to professors, founders, engineers and independent contributors. The quality of the submissions prompted an increase in the prize pool to $5,000, with first and second prizes and three joint third prizes.
The winning essays propose ways to understand gaps in historical earthquake records, make published rare-disease evidence more useful, improve liver-cancer surveillance, produce better environmental data, and investigate the recovery of war-damaged soil.
“I started Sifr to find people in the region and the diaspora with expertise and ideas they had few places to share,” said Ubadah Sabbagh, PhD, founder of the Sifr Prize. “The essays and notes of encouragement that came back were heartening. It felt like the beginning of a collective brainstorm about what we could work on together.”
First prize — $2,500
Abdulrahman Al-Taweel
Auditing the Silence: A Reporting-Bias Surface for the Medieval Levantine Earthquake Record
Al-Taweel, a computer science undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, proposes a model of which earthquakes medieval Arabic chronicles were likely to miss. His essay asks how researchers can distinguish a gap in the historical record from a period of genuine seismic quiet.
Second prize — $1,000
Sami Fouad Bizzari
Variant annotation in the context of rare disease: From peer-reviewed publications to pipeline
Bizzari, a clinical genetics researcher at the Hamdan Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation for Medical and Educational Sciences in Dubai, proposes an AI-assisted pipeline to make published evidence on Arab families with rare genetic disorders easier to use. It would turn findings into structured records for interpreting genetic variants, with uncertain records flagged for expert review.
Joint third prize — $500 per essay
Ahmad Amr
After the cure: HCC surveillance for Egypt's four million
Amr, an Egyptian medical student at the University of Cyberjaya in Malaysia, proposes research to develop liver-cancer surveillance suited to Egyptians who remain at risk after hepatitis C treatment. His essay sets out work on locally validated risk assessment, affordable tests and a practical route from screening to follow-up.
Monserrat Echegoyen Lopez
The Arab World Is Moving Too Fast for Its Environmental Data
Echegoyen Lopez, a PhD candidate at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, proposes producing environmental data directly from industrial operations, with regularly updated uncertainty estimates. Her proposed first test would compare automated estimates from a desalination plant with a manual environmental assessment.
Maria Christelle Salibian and Yasmina Nehme
When the Land Remembers: BIORESTORE, a Time-Resolved Biotechnology System for Lebanon’s War-Damaged Soil
Salibian and Nehme, master’s students at the American University of Beirut, propose repeated soil testing and controlled recovery trials for war-damaged farmland in southern Lebanon. Their BIORESTORE proposal would distinguish hazardous areas needing specialist treatment from soils suitable for recovery trials, helping inform decisions about when cultivation could safely resume.
The contest assessed problem definition, technical depth, actionability and insight. Volunteer scientists, engineers and professors from organisations like Google, OpenAI, Meta, MIT, Stanford, Georgia Tech, UC Berkeley, Columbia University, Qatar Foundation and Emirates Genome Council helped review selected, blinded essays. They contributed in their individual capacities.
The 16 honorable mentions recognize the quality and ingenuity of essays covering health, heat and safety, environment and infrastructure, and language and AI. They carry no cash award. All 21 selected essays are published in full on the Sifr Prize website with their authors’ permission. The authors retain the rights to their work.
Read the results and essays: https://sifrprize.com/results
Explore the submission report: https://sifrprize.com/report
About the Sifr Prize
The Sifr Prize is an independent essay contest asking people to identify problems in the Arab world and explain the scientific or engineering research needed to solve them.
Ubadah Sabbagh, PhD, is the founder of the Sifr Prize and a former MIT researcher. His background spans neuroscience, AI, and bioengineering.
Media contact
Ubadah Sabbagh, PhD
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