Abu Dhabi: President His Highness Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan has issued a decree appointing Omran Anwar Mohammed Sharaf Al Hashemi as member of the diplomatic corps with the rank of ambassador and assistant to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation for science and advanced technology.
Omran Sharaf is an Emirati engineer who held the post of project manager of the UAE’s first mission to Mars, the Emirates Mars Mission. He is also the director of the programme management department at the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre.
Since June 2022, Sharaf has been appointed as Chairman of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.
In 2006, he was recruited as the first employee to join the newly established Emirates Institution for Advanced Science and Technology (EIAST). He lived in South Korea for seven years, working on the Command and Data Handling Subsystem of DubaiSat-1. On EIAST’s second EO mission, DubaiSat-2, Omran worked on the Systems Engineering in addition to the Command and Data Handling Subsystem. He was assigned as Director of Space Images Processing and Analysis Department from the 2011-2014
He graduated from the University of Virginia University in 2005 with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and earned a master’s degree in science and technology in 2013 from Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology. His dissertation was title “A Satellite for Knowledge Economy: Knowledge Transfer in the UAE Space Program”.
