Along with leading scientists, influential politicians and technological breakthroughs, an Emirati woman was ranked among the Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2014. The list is compiled by an Italian think tank and includes some of the most important and influential individuals and inventions of the past year.
The woman who appears in the LSDP Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2014 is Prof. Maha Barakat, Director General of the Health Authority Abu Dhabi. She is not only in charge of the health authority, but also a co-founder of the Imperial College London Diabetes Centre in Abu Dhabi. The innovative centre, which specializes in diabetes treatment, research, training and public health, opened in 2006 as one of the most modern healthcare facilities in the UAE and the Middle East. In fact, according to the Italian think tank Lo Spazio della Politica, which compiled the ranking, the centre in Abu Dhabi is a model for the treatment of diabetes in the Persian Gulf. And as we all know this the region with the highest incidence in the world.
Dr. Barakat ranks 83rd in the list of the top 100 thinkers of 2014 as one of the few entries from the Middle East. The first position in the ranking is for Ameyo Stella Adadevoh, who was the Nigerian physician, managed to curb a wider spread of the Ebola virus in Nigeria and the world. She placed the patient zero in quarantine, but later tested positive for the dangerous disease and two weeks later, died. She is followed by the space aircraft “Phliae”, carried by Rosetta, which successfully landed on a comet. The Iran-US geneticist and computational biologist Pardis Sabeti comes 3rd, because she sequenced the Ebola virus and its mutations.
The list is full of people whose achievements have brought a major improvement in the world, but also inventions and organizations. One of them is the website The World Top Income Database, co-run by author of “Capital in the 21st Century” Thomas Piketty. Another company is Deep Mind (No.21), which is working on artificial intelligence, while surprisingly, Amazon Echo appears on No.99 – apparently, the digital assistant for the home has impressed the Italian team.
Amazingly, the country of Finland comes at No. 27 in the ranking for being the “harbinger” of the EU’s economic thought. The winner of the singing contest Eurovision 2014 and incredibly scandalous Thomas “Tom” Neuwirth, better known as Conchita Wurst, is 94th, while the president of the Philippines, Benigno Simeon Cojuangco Aquino III comes at 47th. And French Minister of Economy Emmanuel Macron is ranked 23rd for his reforms in the economy of the country.
