Prof. Omneya Attallah receives the 2026 Deep Learning Indaba Cheikh Anta Diop Award

Congratulations to Professor Omneya Attallah, a 2025 Falling Walls Women’s Impact Awards winner supported by the Elsevier Foundation, on receiving the 2026 Cheikh Anta Diop Award from the Deep Learning Indaba.

The award recognises excellence in research, teaching and community service by early- to mid-career academics working in artificial intelligence and the computational and statistical sciences at African universities, honouring Cheikh Anta Diop’s legacy as a multidisciplinary scientist and visionary intellectual. This year’s Indaba Awards drew more than 50 nominations across four categories, reviewed by the Awards Committee and a team of external reviewers from academia, research and industry.

Professor Attallah is affiliated with the Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport (AASTMT) in Egypt, where her research spans breast cancer detection, paediatric epilepsy diagnosis, wearable biosensing and explainable AI. Her work includes CanSense, a breathomics AI system for non-invasive breast cancer screening built on Egyptian clinical data with local clinicians — building on the breast-cancer detection research recognised by her Falling Walls award in 2025. She has also designed AASTMT’s undergraduate Biomedical Engineering curriculum and supervised 13 postgraduate researchers to completion, most of them women.

For Professor Attallah, the recognition is validation: she says it reminds her that every late night, sacrifice and challenge she has faced as a working mother and African researcher has been worthwhile, and proves that perseverance truly pays off.

We are proud to see her research and mentorship recognised on this stage, and to celebrate another milestone in her career.