Who’s Who: Mishari Almishari, deputy director of the National Information Center

Mishari Almishari. (Supplied)

Mishari Almishari, who was recently awarded the Order of King Abdul Aziz Second Class for his services to the country, has been deputy director of the National Information Center (NIC) since Sept. 2019.
The NIC provides IT solutions and services to Saudi government bodies and has one of the largest IT centers in the Middle East.
It was set up three decades ago as the Computer Center, which became the General Administration of Central Information, changing to the NIC in the 1980s.
Almishari received a bachelor’s degree from King Saud University (KSU) in 2001 and completed his postgraduate studies in the US, receiving a master’s in computer science from the University of Southern California in 2006.
He did a doctorate in computer science at the University of California, Irvine, with his thesis focusing on (online) security and privacy.
During his stay in the US, Almishari worked as a research intern at Xerox Corp. in New York in 2010.
On his return to the Kingdom, he joined KSU in 2013 as an assistant professor. He taught undergraduate courses and conducted research in the areas of security and privacy until 2019.
He was a deanship consultant for over two years and supervised several IT-related projects at KSU between 2013 and 2015.
Almishari was chief information officer at Saudi Customs from 2016 to 2017.
His research papers have been published in scientific journals, while his dissertation on machine learning and security and privacy for the modern web was published in five scientific journals.