Nour Ali

Nour Ali is the founder and team-lead of LifeLines, a student-driven humanitarian innovation platform based at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar (CMU-Q) that empowers students to design and build “software that saves lives.” Through LifeLines, Nour leads the annual LifeLines Hackathon, a multi-day event that connects university & high-school students with real-world humanitarian challenges—from education in conflict zones to crisis management and public health. The initiative has attracted support from global partners such as WISE, QRCS, EAA, and QRDI, and continues to grow as a regional model for socially impactful tech-driven education.

With a bachelor’s degree in Computational Biology and a minor in Cognitive Neuroscience, Nour graduated with honors from CMU-Q and recently taught the Intro to Computational Biology course. She designs project-based curricula that integrate biological data analysis with machine learning and interdisciplinary problem-solving.

Beyond teaching, Nour is actively involved in applied machine learning research for medical diagnosis, particularly in ranking-based models for clinical decision support systems. She has led experiments using gold-standard datasets, neural network architectures, and novel aggregation techniques to evaluate and enhance diagnostic accuracy—combining deep technical work with a strong emphasis on real-world applicability.

Nour’s work bridges education, technology, and humanitarian impact. Her mission is to inspire a new generation of students to not only build technical skills—but to use them in service of those most in need.