Mrs. Neyla Al Akl received her Bachelor’s degree in Medical Laboratory Technology from the Balamand University, Lebanon and pursued her Master’s in Immunology and Microbiology from the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. She worked as an assistant embryologist at EVE Fertility Center in Beirut and after obtaining her MS degree she joined the department of Experimental pathology, Immunology and Microbiology at the American University of Beirut as a Research Assistant. During her 7 years of laboratory research work she was involved in several projects related to the effect of bovine cartilage, antibiotics and Coley’s mixed bacterial toxin on tumor growth, in addition to defining the mechanism of action of certain vaccine adjuvants.

Mrs Neyla joined QBRI in 2018 and is part of Dr. Arredouani's team. She provides technical and administrative support to all members of the team and is also involved in a research project that focuses on the association between the salivary alpha- amylase and metabolic disorders in the Qatari population.

Ms. Aisha AlMulla is currently pursuing her Master's in Biological and Biomedical Sciences at Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU), and is working under the supervision of Dr. Essam Abdelalim of QBRI. She obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Biological Sciences (Cancer Biology) from the University of Westminster, London in 2017. She worked on exploring the role of Epithelial-to-Mesenchymal Transition markers in HER2+ breast cancer cells, mainly focusing on the expression levels of the mesenchymal marker SNAIL involved in metastasis of primary cancer cells to secondary organs.

She gained brief experience from working on differentiation and maintenance of iPSCs in Dr. Essam Abdelalim’s laboratory in 2014. Keeping in view the promising applications of stem cells in disease treatment, she is currently working on the generation and differentiation of pluripotent stem cells to hepatocytes in the same lab, as a part of a bigger project that explores the pathogenesis and underlying molecular mechanisms of insulin resistance and diabetes.

Ms. Eman W. Abdelsalam is a PhD student at Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) in the Genomics and Precision Medicine (GPM) program, since August, 2017. Her thesis focuses on studying inherited insulin resistance in the offspring of parents with type 2 diabetes, using human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) - under the supervision of Dr. Essam Abdelalim. She obtained her Master 's and Bachelor's degrees in Microbiology from Benha University in Egypt. In 2014, Eman joined Qatar University as a Research Assistant at the College of Arts and Science (CAS), where she was involved in projects studying the microbial community analyses and impact network analysis toward integrated disease management and other ecological concerns.

Ms. Eman W. Abdelsalam was also involved in a project focused on the isolation of natural products from medicinal plants used in Qatari traditional medicine and the determination of their antimicrobial, antioxidant and anticancer properties. In 2017, she joined Biomedical Research Center (BRC) at Qatar University as a research assistant, where she participated in different research projects in collaboration with Hamad medical corporation (HMC), Ministry of Environment, College of health Science and others. Her interest was to investigate the Epidemiologic and Genotypic characteristics of ESBL and carbapenems among clinical isolates from children presented with urinary tract infection (UTI) in primary health care in Qatar. Mrs. Abdelsalam received the Best Faculty & Postdoc Poster Award in medical, biomedical and health science in 2018.

Dr. Mifsud graduated in biology from Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest in 2006 and obtained her PhD from the Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna in 2010. Her work with Thomas Jenuwein involved the epigenetic characterisation of a histone methylation deficient mouse model. After her molecular biology training, she started bioinformatics in the laboratory of Professor Nicholas Luscombe at EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Cambridge, and subsequently moved to UCL and the Crick Institute in London. In her postdoctoral work she focussed on developing methods for the analysis of Hi-C type data and finding new biological insights into transcriptional regulation, by applying these methods to Hi-C and capture Hi-C data sets. Dr. Mifsud joined the William Harvey Research Insitute in QMUL as an MRC eMedLab Career Development Fellow and Lecturer in 2015, where she used chromatin interaction data to understand the function of regulatory GWAS mutations. Dr. Mifsud has been an Assistant Professor at HBKU since July 2018.

Khaled Machaca is Professor of Physiology and Biophysics. He has been training and supervision of Hamad Bin Khalifa University graduate students for the past 5 years. Alongside that, he is a professor at Weill Cornell Medicine and serves as the Senior Associate Dean for Research, Innovation and Commercialization for the Qatar campus. In that capacity he oversees the academic, financial, operational and compliance aspects of the research department, which currently encompasses about 200 researchers. Dr Machaca oversaw the establishment of the administrative and regulatory infrastructure, centralized core laboratories, and faculty recruitment. 

The Machaca Lab is interested in intracellular signaling under physiological and pathological conditions with a focus on calcium signaling. Our goal is to better define these signaling pathways at the cellular and molecular levels to identify potential therapeutic targets in various disease states. We are particularly interested in the role of calcium in cancer, cardiovascular and immune disfunction, as well as in oocyte maturation in preparation for fertilization. Work from the Machaca Lab has been published in leading biomedical journals and garnered continuous extramural funding from NIH and the Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF).  Khaled serves of several editorial boards, reviews widely for scientific journals and granting agencies, and has an extensive track record of training students and postdoctoral fellows.

Dr. Samir Belhaouari is an Associate Professor at the College of Science and Engineering at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. He conducts research in various areas, including classification techniques, feature extraction and selection, and data preprocessing. Dr. Belhaouari is developing the multilevel architecture of deep learning (MADL), which optimizes networks at different levels and stages. He has created innovative algorithms for time-frequency decomposition, feature selection, and optimization techniques. Additionally, he explores image and graph representation methods to address complex data challenges and works on compressing deep learning to improve performance while reducing costs and energy consumption.

Additionally, he has developed an enhanced hashing function, drawing inspiration from a mathematical conjecture. His contributions have been recognized through the securing of several national and international research funds, such as HBKU-Thematic and QNRF-NPRP-BSRA. Dr. Belhaouari has served as the principal investigator (PI) and played a significant role in the field of AI. Dr. Belhaouari's work encompasses mathematics, machine learning, data analysis, and classification. His pioneering techniques and algorithms hold great potential for enhancing performance across a wide range of applications.

Dr. Bo Wang is an Associate Professor in the College of Science and Engineering at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. He received the B. Eng. degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, in 2010 and the M. Phil and PhD degrees in Electronic and Computer Engineering from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Hong Kong, in 2012 and 2015, respectively.

He worked in RLE, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on low-power graphene-based pressure sensor interface design, in 2016. From 2010 to 2015, he was with the Smart Sensory Integrated System Laboratory (s2is) of HKUST as a research assistant and then a research associate. From 2012 to 2014, he also worked as a mixed-signal IC designer in ZAMI, Hangzhou, to commercialize the chip during his PhD research. Dr. Bo Wang is a member of IEEE (CAS Society and SSCS Society).

He received the Best Design Award at the Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC) in 2016. He also serves as a technical committee member of the IEEE CAS Committee on Sensory Systems and Associate Editor for the IEEE Sensors Journal.

Dr. Saif Al-Kuwari is an associate professor at the College of Science and Engineering and director of the Qatar Center for Quantum Computing (QC2) at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. Dr. Saif Al-Kuwari graduated in computers and networks from the University of Essex and has two PhDs in Cryptography and Computational Forensics from the University of Bath and Royal Holloway, University of London

He is a fellow of IET and BCS and a senior member of IEEE and ACM. His research focuses on quantum cryptography, quantum machine learning, and quantum sensing.

Dr. Issam Hmila obtained his PhD in Biology between the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium, and the University of Tunis El Manar, Tunisia in 2010. He obtained an interuniversity diploma in advanced bioinformatics knowledge from the University-Paris Cité, France. He has also completed various courses in biostatistics, immunology, drug design, and discovery from international institutes.

His projects focus on the construction of combinatory libraries, phage display screening, and the engineering of nanobodies for immunotherapy. He was hired as an assistant professor at the Pasteur Institute in 2012, where he developed aptamers and new tools for detecting respiratory viruses of clinical importance in collaboration with the University of Minnesota, USA, and Uppsala University, Sweden. 

In 2017, he joined the Neurological Disorders Research Center at Qatar Biomedical Research Institute, where he conducted his research to develop new tools for therapy against Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases based on nanobodies and aptamers. His work focuses on the generation of cortical neurons from induced pluripotent stem cells and the evaluation by global transcriptomic, proteomic, and integrated omics, environmental pollutants, and new drugs with potential Alzheimer's disease modulation.

Dr. Vijay Gupta received his Master’s degree in Microbiology from CCS University, Meerut, India and Ph.D. at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad, INDIA (2006). Dr. Gupta was awarded ASCB pre-doctoral travel award to attend ASCB annual meeting in 2005, Carl Storm International Diversity Fellowship to attend the Gordon Research Conference in University of New England, Maine, USA 2006 and later on Royal Society International Incoming Fellowship (2006) from the Royal Society, London, UK to perform research at The University of Bristol where he worked for fifteen months with the honorary title of Royal Society International Research fellow. He joined The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, USA on Target Characterization Fellowship funded by Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, USA as CF fellow for five years and then moved to University of California, San Diego as Assistant Project Scientist where he worked till June, 2017.

Dr. Gupta has multidisciplinary research experience in the fields of protein trafficking, cancer and human genetic diseases and has published more than fifteen publications including top-tier journals such as Nature Chemical biology, Developmental Cell, PNAS, JCS and Traffic. He is an invited member of Sigma Xi- Scientific Honor Society, elected 2013, invited member of Cell Stress Society International (CSSI), USA, peer review board member of JoVe and Dove press and has reviewed more than thirty manuscripts. One of the hobbies of Dr. Gupta is popular science writing for the general public, aimed at raising scientific awareness.