Ayman Shabana Receives a $100,000 Research Excellence Award

Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar (SFS-Q) faculty member Ayman Shabana received the Research Excellence Award in recognition of the Best Arts, Behavioral and Social Sciences, Humanities and Islamic Studies Research Program of the Year during the award distribution ceremony of Qatar Foundation’s Annual Research Forum on Monday 22nd October held at the National Convention Centre.

Dr. Shabana, visiting assistant professor and research director of the Islamic Bioethics Project at SFS-Q won the prestigious prize for his presentation entitled “Sustaining Islamic Bioethics Research.” The presentation highlighted the main features of the Islamic bioethics research project that he has led at SFS-Q for more than two years.

“I am incredibly proud of Dr. Shabana and his research at Georgetown SFS-Q. Research excellence is one of our core aims at Georgetown and this recognition by QNRF proves that we are conducting world-class work that is providing real, meaningful contributions for our society, in Qatar, the region and the world at large” said Dean Gerd Nonneman.

Commenting on receiving the award for best research program in the fourth track of the Annual Research Forum, Dr. Shabana noted: “The project has been a wonderful collaborative effort and this award recognizes all the hard work and dedication of the project’s team members. This is definitely a great honor and responsibility and we are determined to exert our best effort to sustain this exciting research venture and accomplish its goals.”

The project began with a successful three-year grant proposal (2009-2012), entitled Islamic Medical and Scientific Ethics (IMSE), which was submitted to the National Priorities Research Program (NPRP) of Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF) by Doris Goldstein (PI), former Director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics (KIE) Library at Georgetown University’s main campus, and Frieda Wiebe (Co-PI), Director of the SFS- Q Library. This proposal aimed to expand the scope of the reputable KIE Library collection of bioethics resources to include Islamic bioethical resources.

Dr. Shabana’s presentation at this year’s Annual Research Forum focused on the gradual transformation of the original proposal and its expansion to include various scholarly activities and initiatives, in addition to its main bibliographic focus. Some of the important achievements of this project include: the development of a comprehensive physical collection of Islamic bioethics resources and a database of bibliographic citations of these resources; facilitating various collaborative research initiatives with interested stakeholders; facilitating the production of several scholarly publications on Islamic bioethics that have either appeared or scheduled to appear in important academic journals; and raising awareness about Muslim contributions and perspectives on bioethical debates through presentations at local, regional, and international conferences and meetings. These efforts culminated in the successful organization of an international conference on Islamic bioethics that was held at SFS-Q in June 2012, which brought together some of the important researchers both in the West and in the Muslim world.

The presentation also demonstrated how these activities inspired another successful three-year (2012-2015) grant application “Encyclopaedia of Islamic bioethics”, which Dr. Shabana submitted to the fifth cycle of the NPRP program.

Dr. Shabana commented, “The new proposal is meant to capitalize on the expertise that has been developed through work on the first project. It aims at maintaining and expanding the existing project and also to utilize available tools and resources for the development of the world’s first encyclopaedia of Islamic bioethics.”

According to the proposed plan, this ambitious research project is expected to fill a conspicuous vacuum in bioethical research and to benefit research in Islamic and comparative ethical, legal, social, and cultural studies.

Dr. Shabana’s presentation outlined the goals, methods, and potential impact of this new project. Shabana concluded “we believe that this project is extremely important because it is of great global interest, it has tremendous research capacity potential, and it is poised to have a significant impact on bioethics research not only in Qatar but worldwide.”

“Frieda Wiebe, Library Director, SFS-Q who worked closely with Dr. Shabana on his research concluded, ‘I am enormously pleased and proud of Dr. Shabana for receiving this research excellence award. It is tangible evidence of the importance of Islamic Bioethics as a specialized field of study and it brings prominence to the work that Georgetown libraries have done to develop a database of resources on the topic. It also recognizes the value of bringing resources and knowledge together in the production of an encyclopedia. We at SFS-Qatar are proud to be leaders in this area of research and publication.’