Dr. Fatma Al-Widyan is an entrepreneur, lecturer at the School of Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering, and the Director of Student Teams.  In her capacity as Director of Student Teams, she leads the faculty’s Teams' plans, budget, and administrative and financial strategy, to unlock UTS’s students' potential.

Dr Al Widyan developed new strategic directions and a clear framework for tracking innovation trends in our student's education by creating a solid vision for the projects-based Teams that align with the curriculum to provide a successful knowledge aspiration. Al-Widyan is leading the student innovation in the fields of Automotive, Space, and Engineering Design Methodologies in the Faculty of Engineering & Information Technology such as the UTS Motorsports Autonomous Car, the UTS Motorsports Electric Car, the UTS Mars Rover, the UTS Rocketry, ATN Solar Car, and Solar Decathlon Design Challenge.

Dr. Al-Widyan is a senior- level who brings over 5 years of extensive experience in management, engineering and technology, and innovation in the field of higher education. Also, Dr. Alwidyan led an exceptional strategic shift in the Faculty's extracurricular activities, initiating innovative projects, improving Budget utilization, and living students' experience across various fields.

Under Dr. Al-Widyan's leadership, the UTS Student Teams achieved numerous awards. Notably, in 2023, the UTS Motorsport Team won the Inspiring Motorsport Team in 2023 from SAE- A formula competition. In the Australian Rover Challenge 2022, the UTS Rover Team won the Best Team Culture and Third Place overall. In the Solar Decathlon Design Challenge 2022 in the areas of design culture, and climate change -The UTS Team came out on top in the New Housing category of the competition, earning the title of WINNERS 2022. Furthermore, the UTS Rocketry Team won the SHOAL Award - Modelling and Simulation Award 2020 in the Australian Universities Rocket Competition and Best Payload Design (Crystallising honey and flipping a coin from 10k feet). They also participated in the Experimental Sounding Rocket Association (ESRA) Spaceport America Cup in 2023.

Recently, Dr Al Widyan's research focused more on Engineering Education, with an interest in Team-Based Research Projects, Active Learning, and Teamwork. Dr Al-widyan teaches fundamentals of Mechanical Engineering, Strength of Materials, and Engineering Technologies. Dr. Al Widyan is a faculty board and member of the Engineering Australia committee.

Dr. Al-Widyan joined UTS in 2014. She holds a Master's degree in Industrial Engineering and a Bachelor's degree from Jordan University of Science and Technology. Dr Al-Widyan received her PhD in PhD in Mechanical Engineering- Transportation/ Passenger Behavior from the University of Technology Sydney in 2018. Her research proposed a novel effort-based theoretical framework for pedestrian route choice problems to discover principles pedestrians use to select their routes. Pedestrian chooses their route by optimizing certain criteria such as distance, time, and effort. Several possible criteria that could be used to predict the route choices of a pedestrian are re-assessed. In most cases, the common criteria of a pedestrian route choice are route length and travel time. The effort is proposed as an additional criterion, which indicates metabolic energy.