Ahlam Al Qasim earned a Physics BSc from NYU Abu Dhabi, where, for her graduating thesis, she designed a Cubesat mission (Light-1 Sat) to study Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes (TGFs) emitted from thunderclouds in Earth's atmosphere. The payload proposal was the winner of the UAE Space Agency's Minisat competition in 2018, which gave her team the chance to launch the mission to space in 2021. Alongside the Cubesat mission, she’s currently an Astrophysics PhD student at UCL's Mullard Space Science Laboratory in the UK, working on developing a new method to construct X-ray luminosity functions of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) to better understand their evolution over cosmic time, and the role that supermassive black holes play in galaxy formation. Aside from this, Ahlam is very passionate about science outreach and communication. She is the co-founder of two initiatives involved in just that, Arab Women in STEM (AWIS) and UAE STEM in the UK (USU). AWIS aims to promote and empower Arab females and their contributions to the science community worldwide, and one their current projects is a partnership with the Letters to a Pre-scientist program, in which they connect low-income school students with Arab women STEM professionals as pen-pals for the academic year. USU on the other hand aims to foster knowledge and connect UAE nationals working in STEM fields with the science community in the UK through a series of outreach events, one of which included hosting sessions in the monthly Lates events at the Science Museum in London (pre-pandemic). Ahlam holds very high hopes for the growing and flourishing space sector in the UAE, and hopes to be able to play a leading role in it someday.