Halima Bensmail received her PhD from Pierre & Marie Currie University in Paris, France, and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington and FHCRC in Seattle, Washington, USA. Halima has worked as an assistant and associate professor at the University of Tennessee and the Virginia Medical School before joining Qatar Foundation. She is currently a principal scientist at the Qatar Center for Artificial Intelligence, Qatar Computing Research Institute and a joint full professor at the ICT college, Hamad Bin Khalifa University and also a visiting full professor at Texas A&M university . Halima's expertise lies in the frontiers of machine learning, bioinformatics and computational biology, and she is also a statisticians and a biostatistician.

Halima has published over 140 peer-reviewed papers in high-impact journals such as Nature Communications, Nucleic Acids Research, Genome Research, Briefings in Bioinformatics, Scientific Reports and Bioinformatics to name a few. She has also earned multiple research awards and taught courses in Qatar, the US, and France and mentored many summer interns, master's and PhD students. Halima has been the principal investigator and co-investigator on various research grants, and she is currently a member of a $2 million newly founded center provided by the USDA grant agency to the obesity center at Texas Tech. Halima has worked as a reviewer for the NIH and NSF, and she is a board member of the Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Technology Foundation in Davos, as well as an AdCom representative of IEEE EMBs in MENA.