A Journey of Excellence: Hanoona Rasheed’s Rise at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
Hanoona Rasheed has emerged as one of the standout success stories of Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, graduating as the Class of 2026 valedictorian after joining the university’s inaugural cohort in 2021. Over six years, she built an exceptional research profile with more than 5,800 citations, over 7.8 million model downloads, and publications at leading AI conferences including CVPR, ICCV, NeurIPS, and ICLR.
Specializing in multimodal AI foundation models, Hanoona contributed to influential projects such as GLaMM and Video-ChatGPT, helping advance visual and language understanding technologies. Her research gained global recognition, leading to internships at Meta and Adobe in San Francisco, where she co-authored cutting-edge AI models.
Despite opportunities in Silicon Valley, Hanoona chose to remain at MBZUAI as a postdoctoral researcher, citing the university’s collaborative research culture and strong mentorship as key reasons behind her decision. She credits supervisors Dr. Salman Khan and Professor Fahad Khan for shaping her academic journey.
For Hanoona, impactful research is not only about publications, but about creating tools that people around the world can use to solve real-world challenges.
