Osman M. Bakr is Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Vice Provost for Strategy at KAUST; and Associate Editor at ACS Materials Letters. He earned a B.Sc. in Materials Science and Engineering from MIT as well as a M.S. and a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Harvard University. His research group works on the design and synthesis of hybrid and inorganic materials to generate breakthrough applications in solar energy harvesting, photonics, and optoelectronic devices. Bakr published over 335 articles in international peer-reviewed journals.

Bakr is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) and a Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (FIMMM). He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Boards of ACS Energy Letters and Chemistry of Materials. He was awarded The King’s Award for Inventors (2018); the Asian Rising Stars Lectureship (2019); the Shoman Award in Basic Sciences and the Almarai Distinguished Scientist Prize (2020); the Kroll Medal & Prize by the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (2021); the Kuwait Prize by Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (2022). The Times Higher Education named Bakr one of the ten leading university researchers world-wide in the field of “perovskite solar cells” (2018) and Clarivate designated Bakr as a Highly Cited Researcher in both Materials Science and Chemistry.