Deputy Rector for Planning and Development
Biography
Prof. Dr. Fuad Mire Hassan is a computer scientist specialising in data science, natural language processing, and machine learning. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom (2021), where his doctoral research developed multistage deep learning methods for fine-grained fake news detection. He holds a Master of Science in Computer Science from Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (2012) and a Bachelor of Science in Information Technology from SIMAD University (2007).
He joined Somali National University as Professor of Computer Science in 2022 and has taught and supervised graduate students across several Somali institutions, including master’s programmes in data science. He previously served as Dean of the Faculty of Computing at SIMAD University and as a Research Fellow leading a funded project to build natural language processing resources for the Somali language — work spanning corpora, lemmatisation lexicons, and text classification.
Prof. Fuad has published in international venues including IEEE, Springer, and the ACL workshops on African NLP, where a co-authored paper on Somali-language fake news and toxic content detection received a Best Paper Award (2025). He has also served as an ICT Advisor to the Office of the Prime Minister of Somalia in partnership with UNDP, advising on digitalisation, ICT policy, and institutional systems.
As Deputy Rector for Planning and Development, he leads institutional strategy, digital transformation, and the university’s long-term growth agenda.