Nizar Habash gives new meaning to the term international student. A Palestinian with Jordanian citizenship, he was born in Baghdad, Iraq, and by the time he enrolled as an undergraduate at Old Dominion in 1991, he had lived in Beirut, Lebanon (until the 1982 war), Damascus, Syria (two years), Moscow, Russia (one year) and Tunis, Tunisia (six years).

After earning dual degrees, Habash went to the University of Maryland, where he received his master's and will complete his Ph.D. in computer science in December.

His dissertation is based on a new approach that he developed, called Generation-Heavy Machine Translation, which focuses on translating from languages with limited resources to those with rich resources.

For someone who has lived in so many countries and speaks five languages, perhaps it's not surprising that Habash became intrigued by communication as a field of study. He first came to the Old Dominion campus in 1990 at the age of 16 to study at the English Language Center. He made some friends during that time and decided to return to the university after high school.

"Besides the worldwide reputation for excellence that U.S. universities enjoy, my family wanted me to experience another culture fully," Habash said. "For my parents, education was more than what can be taught at schools, but rather a holistic, integrative experience.

"Being an ocean and a continent away from home and so young, I needed a place that treated me as a person, as a member of a family. I surely found that at ODU."

He also found "continuous stimulation of mind and soul - from creating a music synthesizer playing 'Jingle Bells' in a computer engineering class to constructing a religion in a philosophy of world religions class."

In addition, Habash's interest in languages fueled his imagination. He invented an artificial human language called Delason (www.Delason.com). "It provided a nice experimental laboratory for applying what I was learning in linguistics in addition to being an artistic outlet," he said. "A year after my graduation, I learned that the Honors College added one of the symbols in my artificial language to its logo. I cried that day. This is a perfect example of ODU's encouragement of creativity."

Habash says he owes thanks to many from the Old Dominion community for his education and support: Mary El-Kadi, "a great personal adviser"; John P. Broderick, "for his guidance, support and enlightening discussions"; Janet Bing, "for teaching me about feminism and opening my eyes to the power of language"; Judy Dumas, "for the gift of understanding metaphor and symbolism in literature"; and Lou Henry, "for his continuous encouragement and reenergization of my soul (and making sense of the American tax system)."

Habash, who earned numerous honors during his undergraduate years, said he had many pleasant experiences at Old Dominion, which included participating in everything from Passover seders to Kwanzaa celebrations.

"Most of what I knew about American culture before I came to the U.S. I learned from Hollywood," he admitted. "But that didn't prepare me for the full experience of American holidays such as Halloween or things like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. (What a wonderful idea!)"

In addition to his invention of Delason, he is now working on Semiti, a Semitic Esperanto of Arabic and Hebrew, " part of a larger project that is an artistic exploration of Arab and Jewish cultural similarities through forced assimilation of symbols from both."

Once he obtains his doctorate, Habash said he plans to stay in the U.S., where he hopes to work in academia or join a research institute.