Captain Ali Ashour FRINA, FIES, FIMarEST

Researcher UoS PDRC & Senior Engineering Officer, MOI-KCG – State of Kuwait

Captain Ali Ashour is a Kuwaiti senior engineering officer in the naval branch of the Ministry of Interior. He is also an academic researcher in technical policy design, specialising in capability building, multi-domain capacity governance, and strategic feasibility assessments. He holds a degree in Mechanical/Marine Engineering and a master’s in Naval Engineering from the Australian Maritime College (AMC). He is the first non-Commonwealth national to be accepted into BAE Systems’ industry-based research programme, working with the University of Strathclyde’s Peridynamics Research Centre (PDRC) and BAE Systems UK on autonomous digitisation scaling, structural integrity analysis, sensory degradation, and AI-driven predictive threat analytics. Captain Ashour contributes to the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre’s (NCSC) Maritime Cyber Security initiatives, including the IASME Maritime Cyber Baseline, developing redundancy frameworks against emerging cyber threats. His collaborations include the Australian Naval Technical Bureau (NTB), Defence Science and Technology Group (DSTG), The Kelvin, Southampton, and AMC Hydrodynamics Research Tanks, bridging numerical, experimental, and real-world validations with capability scaling. He is also a visiting STEM and technical lecturer at civilian and defence institutions, including the University Royal Naval Unit (URNU). He is the first Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) national to be elected as a Royal Fellow of the Royal Institution of Naval Architects (RINA), a title chartered by His Majesty King Charles III. He is also a Fellow of the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science & Technology (IMarEST) and the Institution of Engineers in Scotland (IES), where he is a chartered advisor, consulting on technical governance, Digitization strategy, innovation, and capacity building. Ali serves as an “Anglo-GCC technical think tank node,” bridging multi-domain research and policy assessment. His work extends Kuwaiti leadership’s vision for international cooperation in standardisation, innovation, and sustainability—uniting academia, industry, and regulatory bodies to tackle shared future challenges against man-made and natural threats.