Born in a Lebanese city “El Mina” Tripoli in 1969, H.E. Talal Hawat holds a Bachelor and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from San Jose State University in California, USA where he spent about 20 years of his life. H.E. Talal Hawat, who also holds an American citizenship has served as Minister of Telecommunications in the cabinet of Hassan Diab from 21 January 2020 to 10 September 2021, and he is today a Telecom expert leader in the Europe, Middle East and Africa Region with a demonstrated successful history in this industry, where he managed different scale projects in various sectors and major institutions related to the engineering, design and development of Fixed internet, Mobile and Enterprise networks across EMEA. H.E. has started his Engineering career in 1995 back in California, where he worked for major Silicon Valley Giants companies such as Applied Materials, Inc. an American corporation that supplies equipment, services and software for the manufacture of semiconductor chips for electronics. Also, he worked for Networking Giant Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, for 19 years, is also an American-based multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. H.E. is currently the Area Vice President at Sandvine Incorporated, an application and network intelligence company based in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Sandvine markets network policy control products that are designed to implement broad network policies, including Internet censorship, congestion management, security and Application Quality of Experience. H.E. has been a lecturer and participated in so many international worldwide conferences over the past thirty years; he is fluent in Arabic, English and French. H.E. is a member of Order of Engineers and Architects in Tripoli since 2012 H.E. is Charter Member and the President of the World Lebanese Economic and Scientific Council WLESC since 2023 H.E. has earned so many prestigious awards during his career at Cisco, "John Chambers Award" in 2002 for Top Performers Engineers, the Cisco Chairman Club Winner- Top 2% of Cisco's Salesforce Worldwide in 2016, Cisco Sales Champion- in 2010, 2012 and 2016, Cisco Systems Engineering Excellence Award EMEAR in 2013, and Cisco Systems Engineer Transitions & Leadership Development Program (STLDP) Graduate. STLDP helps transition the top 1% of our global SE talent into top technical business leaders in 2011.