Undergraduate students from the Department of Geology at United Arab Emirates University (UAEU) triumphed at the American Association of Petroleum Geologist (AAPG) Imperial Barrel Award (IBA) 2016, overstepping competing graduate students from other universities in the Middle East and coming away with second place.

The IBA competition was held this year in Manama, the Kingdom of Bahrain. The IBA is a yearly competition that is held to encourage geology students from different parts of world to investigate a virgin promising area for future oil production. The students are given simple geological information about the target area and are expected to come up with more than 17 outputs in the different geology fields about this area, using advanced technology and their geological background. Eight universities from five countries participated in this competition from: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Sultanate of Oman and United Arab Emirates. The UAEU geology team was supervised by Dr. Amir Gabr, the Geophysics instructor in the Geology Department at UAEU.