Assistant Professor, Information Systems and Security- (CIT)

Dr. Fida Dankar is an assistant professor in the Department of Information Systems and Security, part of the College of Information Technology, at the United Arab Emirates University. She holds a Ph.D in Computer Science and a Master’s degree in Mathematics from the University of Ottawa, Canada. Prior to joining UAEU, Fida was a staff scientist at Sidra Medical and Research Centre where she worked on privacy preserving data sharing and mining. Before that she worked as a research scientist at the IBM Canada Research and Development Centre. She worked there on the secure and private mining of health data. Dr. Dankar was also a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Electronic Health Information Laboratory in the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario. Her postdoctoral work was devoted to the sharing of health information for secondary purposes, whilst protecting the privacy of patients and the identity of healthcare providers.

Currently, her research focuses on multidisciplinary approaches to the private and secure sharing and mining of biomedical data using cryptography, biomedical knowledge modeling and policy analysis. Dr. Dankar’s research centers on the use of electronic health information for research purposes, while still protecting the privacy of both patients and healthcare providers. In one current project (UAEU Startup Grant assisted), she is designing a secure computational method that allows for surveillance and analysis of data. This approach allows multiple healthcare facilities to jointly carry out an analysis of their data while still keeping it private as the sharing of raw data does not occur. The only shared information is the final outcome. Such an approach can also be used to compute sensitive aggregate statistics relating to hospitals and at the same time protect the identity of the hospitals involved. Examples include: calculating the average rate of bacterial infection, or average readmission rates. Dr. Dankar has worked as a professor for eight years. She has published twelve papers in journals, presented eight conference papers and been granted three patents. Outside of work, Dr. Fida is the mother of three (2 boys and one girl) and enjoys cycling, swimming and baking.