King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) is a private research university located in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia.

It was founded in 2009 and provides research and graduate training programs using English as the official language of instruction. It was announced in 2013 that KAUST had one of the fastest growing research and citation records in the world and in the 2016 Nature Index Rising Stars was ranked #19 in the world of the fastest rising universities for high quality research output. KAUST was ranked as the world's top university in citations per faculty ranking indicator as per QS World University Rankings for 2015-2016 and 2016-2017.

KAUST officially opened on September 23, 2009 at an inauguration ceremony, where The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz Al Saudgave a speech.

The University's core campus, located on the Red Sea at Thuwal, is sited on more than 36 square kilometres (14 sq mi), encompassing a marine sanctuary, museum, and research facility.

KAUST is the first mixed-gender university campus in Saudi Arabia. Saudi authorities hope the mixed-gender center will help modernize the Kingdom's deeply conservative society. The religious police do not operate on-site. Women are allowed to mix freely with men and to drive on campus, and they are not required to wear veils in the coeducational classes.

KAUST was Saudi Arabia's first LEED certified project and is the world's largest LEED Platinum campus. Designed by international architecture firm HOK, it was also chosen by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Committee on the Environment (COTE) as one of the 2010 Top Ten Green Projects. The university library received the 2011 AIA/ALA Library Building Award for accomplishments in library architecture.

Mission: KAUST advances science and technology through distinctive and collaborative research integrated with graduate education. They are a catalyst for innovation, economic development and social prosperity in Saudi Arabia and the world

They exist for the pursuit and advancement of scientific knowledge and its broad dissemination and benevolent application. They strive to enhance the welfare of society with a special focus on four areas of global significance – food, water, energy and the environment.

Vision: KAUST aspires to be a destination for scientific and technological education and research. By inspiring discoveries to address global challenges, they strive to serve as a beacon of knowledge that bridges people and cultures for the betterment of humanity.

Core Laboratories

The state-of-the-art core lab facilities provide training and services to the KAUST research teams and their collaborators and partners. Many types of specialized equipment are located across the University core lab facilities. Technical experts train users and run the equipment.

• -The Supercomputing core lab links research institutions in the Kingdom and the region to the Shaheen II supercomputerthrough the 10 gigabits per second (Gbps) Saudi Arabian Advanced Research and Education Network (SAREN). Shaheen—the Arabic word for peregrine falcon—is the fastest supercomputer in the Middle East and is the 15th most powerful in the world, the most powerful supercomputer housed in an academic environment. Developed by Cray, it is capable of 222 teraflops, or 222 trillion floating point operations per second.
• -Visualization: CORNEA is a fully immersive, six-sided virtual reality facility that gives students and researchers the ability to turn data into 3D structures that they can interact with and examine. It was built in partnership with the University of California, San Diego.
• -Nanofabrication: A clean-room environment equipped with tools to support research in advanced materials, biotechnology, electronics and photonics, and MEMS/NEMS.
• -The Imaging and Characterization Labs includes a suite of 11 nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) machines and 10 scanning electron microscopes, seven Titans Super transmission microcopes, and Raman Spectroscopy.
• -Coastal and Marine Resources: Located next to the Red Sea, the facility builds and deploys oceanographic instrumentation and provides operational services to support research vessels for marine exploration, diving, and sampling.
• -Analytical Chemistry: These labs focus on spectroscopy, chromatography and mass spectrometry, trace metals analysis, wet chemistry, and surface analysis.
• -Bioscience: These facilities include cell sorting, genomic and proteomic analysis, protein expression and characterization, cell culture, and high-throughput third generation PacBio technology and next-generation Illumina DNA sequencing platforms to support genomics research projects.
• -Workshops provide design and manufacturing support to fabricate customized experimental tools and equipment for KAUST researchers and their industrial partners.

The university organizes interdisciplinary collaborative research teams across three academic divisions Biological and Environmental Science and Engineering (BESE); Computer, Electrical, and Mathematical Science and Engineering (CEMSE); and Physical Science and Engineering (PSE). It offers two graduate programs: a Master of Science degree (18 months) and a Ph.D. program (3–4 years).

KAUST focuses on research that applies science and technology to problems of human need, social advancement, and economic development. The main research thrusts are Resources, Energy and Environment; Biosciences and Bioengineering; Materials Science and Engineering; Applied Mathematics and Computational Science.

To support these thrusts, KAUST established multidisciplinary Research Centers focused on catalysis, clean combustion, computational bioscience, geometric modeling and scientific visualization, membranes, desert agriculture, Red Sea science and engineering, solar and alternative energy science and engineering, and water desalination and reuse.