Omran Sharaf

Omran Sharaf is the Project Manager of the United Arab Emirates' first Mission to Mars (Hope) and the Director of the Programs Management Department at the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre. Omran graduated in 2005 from the University of Virginia with a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering. He was recruited as the first employee to join the newly established Emirates Institution for Advanced Science and Technology (EIAST) in 2006. He lived in South Korea for 7 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 & Data Handling Subsystem. He was assigned as Director of Space Images Processing & Analysis Department from the 2011-2014.

Omran earned his master's degree in 2013 from KAIST. His dissertation was title "A Satellite for Knowledge Economy: Knowledge Transfer in the UAE Space Program"