Texas A&M University at Qatar hosted the first International Computational Science & Engineering Conference 11-12 May at the Hilton hotel Doha. The two-day event, was co-organized by the Texas A&M advanced scientific computing group (TASC) in collaboration with Qatar Computing Research Institute and Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute.

Texas A&M at Qatar Executive Associate Dean Eyad Masad noted the importance of the conference to further research and computational science, saying, "Texas A&M at Qatar is proud to partner with industry, government and academic collaborators such as QEERI and QCRI -- and many others -- to host the inaugural International Computational Science and Engineering Conference. Such events that help realize sustainable solutions to real-world issues and encourage the exchange of knowledge, ideas and expertise that is essential to fuel innovation and new thinking.

"This event illustrated the importance of industry, academic and government partnerships in developing scientific solutions that have direct impact on the world around us." The International Computational Science and Engineering Conference (ICSEC15) gathered researchers, experts and stakeholders locally and globally to discuss recent research topics in computational science and its role to tackle the most complex problems locally and globally.

Dr Othmane Bouhali, conference chair and research associate professor and director of Research Computing at Texas A&M at Qatar, said, "We are proud to organize this unique because it is the first computational science and engineering conference hosted in Qatar that brought computational material scientists, computational biologists and researchers in High Performance Computing. We thank our colleagues who came from abroad, in particular our keynote and invited speakers.

"We succeeded to collect more than eighty abstracts, including participation from Europe, US, Asia and the gulf region. All selected papers will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Computational Science."