Alia Al Mansouri, the young Emirati student, the recipient of the Scientific Achievement award in Global Space Congress in Abu Dhabi, gave a presentation titled “Introduction to Space” about her experience about being the 1st international winner of the “Genes in Space” competition and the launch of her experiment abroad Space X Falcon 9 as part of NASA’s Cargo Resupply-12 mission . Her experiment conducted abroad the International Space Station (ISS) was about detecting gene expression changes induced by stress such as that caused by cosmic radiation and microgravity.

Alia told the university students that she still has lot of ambitions and she hopes to train to become a space astronaut. She believes that the launch of the Hope Probe to Mars will make Emirati students and citizens more interested in space and discovering the secrets of the Red Planet, as was the case when the Apollo program started in the USA as surveys have shown an increase in the number of Americans who entered this field since then. She urged them to have hope and work on achieving what others may deem impossible as she is believer in the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan words,  “There is no such thing as impossible when building the future”.