Professor Martin Steinhoff is a Professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. He is also the Chairman of the Department of Dermatology and Venereology, Director of the Dermatology Institute, and Director of the Translational Research Institute (TRI) at Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC). He is also a Full Professor at Weill Cornell Medical College New York, USA, Weill-Cornell Medicine-Qatar, and Qatar University. He also holds the position of residency program director for dermatology at HMC.

Professor Steinhoff studied medicine and human biology in Germany, where he received his MD, M.Sc., and PhD from the University of Marburg. After his residency in Dermatology/Venereology, he became an Assistant Professor of Dermatology at the University of Muenster in 2002, promoted from assistant to full professor in 6 years.

He holds board certificates in Dermatology, Venereology, Phlebology and Allergy. His clinical fields of interest are inflammatory skin diseases, translational medicine, and -omics technologies. Prof. Steinhoff is an established physician-scientist with a long-standing basic and clinical research background. His group has discovered several mechanisms that are now the basis for new therapies for skin diseases. He is the author of the most relevant textbooks for Dermatology on Skin Inflammation and Allergy.

For his research, Prof Steinhoff received several prestigious international research awards worldwide. He was a member of the board of directors of the European Society of Dermatology Research (ESDR) and an honorary member of several Societies for Dermatology. According to a publication in 2023, he was considered among the Top 1% of dermatologists worldwide.

Luigia is an employment lawyer and policy maker with more than 25 years of exponential experience in labor laws, conciliation and adjudication of employment disputes, leadership and organizational behavior, across different countries and legal systems (common and civil law jurisdictions).

She holds a Master Degree in Law, a Post-Degree Master in Human Resources and Communication, a Women in Leadership Executive Program with London Business School and is a qualified conciliator and mediator of labor disputes certified by the International Training Centre of the International Labour Organisation (ITCILO) and trained by Harvard Law School – Program on Negotiation (PON).

She has established the first administrative employment dispute resolution center in the Middle East operating under the ILO guidelines and is also a certified ITCILO Participatory Gender Audit (PGA) Facilitator, specialized in gender and organizational change.

Policy maker and advocate for justice, Luigia has designed innovative legislation and policies with particular focus on gender equality, decent work, harassment and violence in the workplace, justice and partnerships - UN SDGs 5, 8, 16 and 17 and is also a member of the WHO working group of the World of Work Dialogue.

Dr. Ruffolo is currently the Chairman of Aragen Biosciences, Inc. and Managing Director of Ruffolo Consulting, LLC, a consulting company for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. He is the retired President of Research and Development for Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, and Corporate Senior Vice President of the Wyeth Corporation (now Pfizer). In that role, he managed an R&D organization of 9,000 scientists with an annual budget in excess of $5 billion. Prior to joining Wyeth, Dr. Ruffolo was Senior Vice President and Director of Drug Discovery Research Worldwide at SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals (now GlaxoSmithKline) where he was responsible for approximately 1,700 scientists with an annual budget in excess of $1.2 billion. Prior to that, he was Chairman of the Cardiovascular Research Committee at Eli Lilly and Company.

During his career in the pharmaceutical industry, Dr. Ruffolo played a significant role in the discovery and development of a number of products that are marketed globally, including carvedilol (Coreg®, Dilatrend®, Kredex®, Dimitone®, Eucardia® and Cardiol®) for the treatment of congestive heart failure, ropinirole (Requip®) for Parkinson's disease, dobutamine (Dobutrex®) for the management of acute congestive heart failure and eprosartan (Teveten®) for hypertension. In addition, the research and development groups that Dr. Ruffolo supervised during his career brought 32 new medicines to the market.

Dr. Ruffolo has authored over 500 full-length publications and more than 200 abstracts, and he has edited 15 books. He was the Editor-in-Chief of four international pharmacology journals. He has received many honors throughout his career. Recently, the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET) elected Dr. Ruffolo as a Fellow of ASPET (FASPET), which is an honor bestowed only on its most distinguished members. In addition, ASPET established an annual award in Dr. Ruffolo’s name, the Robert R. Ruffolo Career Achievement in Pharmacology Award (Medal), to honor the contributions made by Dr. Ruffolo to biomedical research and to drug discovery and development. This Award is presented annually to the most prestigious scientists in the world at the height of their careers.

Dr. Ruffolo received two Lifetime Achievement Awards and two Honorary Doctorates. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) awarded its most prestigious award, the Discoverer’s Award, to Dr. Ruffolo for the discovery of carvedilol (Coreg®) for the treatment of congestive heart failure. Carvedilol has saved the lives of tens of millions of patients around the world who suffer from this devastating disease. The American Society for Information Science and Technology designated Dr. Ruffolo as a Highly Cited Scientist for being among the top 100 most-cited pharmacologists in the world for over two decades.

Dr. Al Khodor has been the Director of the Maternal and Child Health program in the research department at Sidra Medicine, Qatar, since July 2019 and an investigator since January 2015. Dr. Al Khodor received her bachelor’s degree in Medical Lab. Technology from the Faculty of Public Health at the Lebanese University in 2001. Soon after, she started her master’s degree in Microbiology and Immunology at the American University of Beirut. Dr. Al Khodor received her second master’s degree and PhD in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, USA. 

She is a Joint Associate Professor at the College of Health and Life Sciences (CHLS), and an adjunct assistant professor at the Department of Biomedical Sciences, College of Health Science, Qatar University.

Dr. Al Khodor has over 36 peer-reviewed publications, a membership of the American Society of Microbiology (since 2005), and is a member of the editorial board of the Frontiers in Microbiology (since 2015).

Dr. Al Khodor currently acts as a guest associate editor for Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology and has been the associate editor for the Journal of Translational Medicine since 2017.

Sahar Isa Da’as is a distinguished research manager at Sidra Medicine and an assistant professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. Her research is centered on functional genomics and translational research. She has worked at IWK Health Centre in Canada, focusing on rare genetic disorders and childhood cancers. She was also awarded the Innovation Excellence Award from Cancer Care Nova Scotia Health Authority.

Dr. Da'as has pioneered innovative approaches using the zebrafish model, focusing on rare pediatric hereditary diseases. She has successfully developed patient-specific genotype models, providing a comprehensive insight into gene variation, clinical presentations, and disease prognosis. This achievement promises a roadmap toward precision medicine and underscores her dedication to advancing healthcare through cutting-edge research.

Through collaborative projects, Dr Da'as continues translating scientific discoveries into practical applications, providing a foundation for translational studies of novel genes and variants. Her work is published in many reputable journals and has significantly advanced the understanding of hereditary diseases.

Dr. Said Ismail is the director of the Qatar Genome Programme (QGP), one of the major national programs in the region. He obtained his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) from the University of Oxford and has work experience extending into various fields including research, education, and consultancy. 

As a research fellow at University College London (UCL), Dr. Ismail served as a consultant to several regional and international pharma and biotech companies. 

Dr. Ismail is especially interested in promoting research among young students and researchers in the Arab world. He launched one of the largest efforts to enhance the Arabic medical and scientific content on the internet; The “Bel-Arabi” or “In- Arabic” initiative. He is also a board member of the Phi Science Institute, which aims to spread creative sciences and research among youth.

Luis R. Saraiva completed his Licenciatura (B.Sc.+M.Sc.) in Biology at the University of Evora, Portugal. He later became a Fellow of the International Graduate School in Genetics and Functional Genomics of the University of Cologne, Germany, where he received his Ph.D. in Genetics. 

After spending a brief period as a visiting scientist at Harvard Medical School (USA), funded by the Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds, he became a post-doctoral scholar at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (USA). In 2013, he was awarded the EBI–Sanger Postdoctoral (ESPOD) Fellowship and continued his postdoctoral training at the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute and the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge (UK). In 2014 he won a Sanger Early Career Innovation Award.

In 2015, he moved to Sidra Medicine (Qatar), where he is a Principal Investigator and leads the Human Disease and Therapeutics Lab at Sidra Medicine (Qatar). He also holds Adjunct Faculty positions at Monell Chemical Senses Center (USA) and Hamad bin Khalifa University (Qatar).

Bernice Lo is an Assistant Professor at the College of Health and Life Sciences at Hamad Bin Khalifa University and an investigator at Sidra Medicine. Her research focuses on understanding the molecular mechanisms of immune regulation and tolerance. Her work includes identifying the genetic basis of disease in patients with immune dysregulation and autoimmunity. The ultimate goal is to elucidate the molecular pathways involved and, therefore, discover new therapeutic targets for disease treatment or novel drugs for immunomodulation.

She has made significant contributions to discovering, understanding, and diagnosing various genetic disorders of immune dysregulation. Dr. Lo’s lab specializes in using cellular and biochemical techniques to uncover the role of newly discovered gene mutations in causing disease and in understanding the function of these genes in immune regulation. She is also interested in developing methods for disease diagnosis or evaluating treatment efficacy by assessing immune biomarkers.

Dr. Sara obtained her medical degree with excellence from Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar, receiving several honors during her studies. She later completed her Ph.D. in Biological and Biomedical Sciences from Hamad bin Khalifa University in 2019. The focus of her Ph.D. was on the use of next-generation sequencing (NGS) and human pluripotent stem cell technologies in monogenic disorders. Dr. Sara has successfully published multiple high-impact publications in the field of pluripotent stem cell technology and NGS. Dr. Sara is an alumna of Harvard Medical School where she completed the Cancer Biology and Therapeutics (CBT) program during her postdoctoral fellowship with a special focus on melanoma, immunotherapy, and immune checkpoint inhibitors.

Dr. Sara further completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Clinical Research Center in Sidra Medicine-Qatar focusing on mesenchymal stem cells isolated from adipose tissue (2015-2018). Dr. Sara joined the dermatology and venereology residency program at HMC in 2018 and served as the chief resident in 2020. Dr. Al-khawaga is currently leading the GeriDerm (Geriatric Dermatology Service) and the lead for the first National Clinical Practice Guidelines for the management of Stevens-Johnson Syndrome (SJS)/Toxic Epidermal Necrolysis (TEN) in Qatar. Dr. Sara received the National Educational Excellence in Research, an award from His Highness The Amir Shaikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al Thani in 2021, and was awarded the Regional Research award from The Arab Board in 2023, a highly competitive award from the Middle East. Dr. Sarah has recently been appointed as a professor in the College of Health and Life Sciences at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar Foundation.