Business Bites: Issues being faced during the COVID-19 pandemic and the impact on Smart Cities

Join our for our next webinar featuring Dr Sabih Khisaf, Head of Engineering at Hyperloop Transportation Technologies Inc. UAE and Prof Chris Rogers, Professor of Geotechnical Engineering, School of Engineering, University of Birmingham.

We will be discussing smart cities and sustainable urban generation; a hot topic that affects us all, so register today!

Meet our Experts 

Dr Sabih Getea Khisaf, Head of Engineering Middle East and North Africa, Hyperlook Transportation Technologies Inc

Sabih is a Chartered Civil and Structural Engineer with over 35 years' experience in the design, engineering and project management of major projects in the UK, Europe and the Middle East. This includes the project management, project engineering, design, construction and maintenance of highway structures, ports, airports, railways and other civil engineering projects. He has advanced knowledge of construction industry, regulatory standards and design criteria pertinent to the civil and structural engineering disciplines. 

With Sabih currently working as the Head of Engineering on the exciting and innovative hyperloop project between Dubai and Abu Dhabi, he has a unique insight into the planning and execution of smart cities.

Chris Rogers, Professor of Geotechnical Engineering, University of Birmingham 

While Chris holds the title of Professor of Geotechnical Engineering - engineering of the ground and everything buried in it - he would describe himself as a civil engineer in the broadest sense. He gained chartered engineering status on the basis of his experience in industry before embarking on an academic career. He chairs the Institution of Civil Engineers' Research, Development & Innovation Panel, with research interests in infrastructure systems and future sustainable, resilient and liveable cities. 

Chris' research into sustainability began nearly twenty years ago, when he led a cross-disciplinary consortium exploring sustainable urban regeneration. This coincides with his tenure as Editor of Engineering Sustainability, a journal that pioneered a more profound understanding of the contribution that civil engineering can make to urban sustainability. He has led on multiple projects including the highly multi-disciplinary  Urban Futures research consortium and the Liveable Cities programme grant, during which time he served on the Lead Expert Group of the UK Government Foresight Future of Cities project. These initiatives combined in using further extreme scenarios to explore how we might deliver aspirational futures free from current constraints.

More recently, Chris is a core member of the UK Collaboratorium for Research on Infrastructure and Cities (UKCRIC). UKCRIC is a major UK initiative underpinned by a capital grant of £138m from the Government matched by the 15 collaborating universities and industry. He leads the new £28m National Buried Infrastructure Facility that is being constructed on campus at Birmingham and is helping to establish UKCRIC's Birmingham Urban Observatory. His particular role on UKCRIC's Coordination Node is Director of Research Integration, in which he is leading research on how to embed into all that we do a movement towards trans-disciplinarity, breaking down the disciplinary, practice and governance silos that get in the way of truly effective engineering outcomes.