Salah El-Sheikh received his PhD from the University of Manitoba in Canada in1989.El-Sheikh worked in the physics department at the United Arab Emirates University as an assistant professor between1993 and1999. He also served as an associate professor in the departments of engineering, physics, and mathematics at the faculty of engineering, Cairo University until 2005. El-Sheikh also has a range of experiences outside the academia. He was the manager of the Modern Physics Project, a project created in collaboration with the Ministry of Higher Education. Also, he has been a reviewer for UNESCO's Science and Technology Education Section. El-Sheikh has also received two grant awards from the British Council. While he was granted the first award in1995 at the theoretical chemistry department, Cambridge University, he received the second in 1997 at the physics department of the same university. El-Sheikh has served as a scientific coordinator for a joint project betwee Egypt and Italy (2008-2011), which involved three Egyptian graduate students doing the experimental part of their thesis in Italy. The analysis of the data and the theoretical verification to be done at AUC. Project Proposal Title: Phase transitions and metastability of strongly pressurized molecular crystalsItalian Scientific coordinator: ULIVI LorenzoEgyptian scientific coordinator: El-Sheikh, Salah Courses TaughtGeneral Physics(I,II)OpticsElectromagnetic TheoryModern PhysicsAtomic and Molecular PhysicsModern OpticsLaser PhysicsQuantum Mechanics

Studies of physical systems under extreme conditions have long been a fruitful source of new insights into the behavior of condensed matter. Static high-pressure techniques, based on the use of the diamond-anvil cell (DAC), now allow to reach pressures in the megabar range and have demonstrated their importance in different fields of science, like, as example, geology, chemistry, physics and material science . Within the last decade, DAC methods have evolved rapidly and are now comparable to the shock technique in terms of the maximum pressures that can be generated -- a technical achievement that was inconceivable ten years ago. Due to the fact that experiments performed under high pressure probe the interatomic interactions, molecular crystals are prototype systems for the study of fundamental interactions and of pressure induced structural modifications when pressure is taken up to the megabar regime. Their importance relies also in the fact that first principle and model potential calculations of the microscopic and macroscopic properties are possible for comparison with the experimental results. Examples of physical problems of fundamental interests are: the understanding of the role of microscopic many body interactions at very high density, the symmetrization of the hydrogen bond in H2O and NH3 solids toward the realization of atomic compounds, the phase diagram of simple monatomic and molecular crystals (experimentally and theoretical modeling), the pressure-induced amorphyzation of water and other molecular systems, the formation of ordered new compounds among noble gases and/or non reactive molecules. The techniques to be applied comprise the use of the DAC with different spectroscopies and resistivity measurements. In this case the use of laboratory or synchrotron based x-rays studies are of fundamental complementary importance for the determination of the structure and phase diagram.