Halima Bensmail received her Ph.D. from the university of Pierre & Marie Currie (Paris 6) in France and spent three years as a postdoc at the University of Washington, in Seattle and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Halima held a two-year research scientist position at the Data Theory Group at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands. In 2000, she joined the University of Tennessee as tenure-track assistant professor in statistics and was tenured and promoted to associate professor in 2005. In 2006, she moved to the Virginia Medical School, where she was the key for building the Master of Public Health program and an associate professor of Biostatistics.

Currently Halima is a Principal Scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute and is leading the Bioiformatics and Computational Biology Group at the Institute. She is also a joint full professor at the College of Computer and Science Engineering at HBKU. Halima Bensmail has published more than 90 peer reviewed papers in high impact Journal such as Nucleic Acids Research, Genome Research, Bioinformatics and Journal of American Statistical Association (JASA) and is mentoring Masters and Ph.D. students. Halima received several distinguished awards such as the award from the “International Federation of Classification Society” and “Qatar Foundation Computing Research Award" and is also Co-PI on different successful research grants in Qatar and abroad. Halima served as a reviewer for National Institute of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF).