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.
 

Maha Al-Thani is a Research Fellow at Qatar Biomedical Research Center. Her primary research focus is human iPSC disease modeling and neurovascular unit co-culture. She received her PhD in Clinical Neurosciences from the University of Cambridge, and her dissertation “hiPSC-Derived Cerebral Small Vessel Disease Models”, published in 2023, was centered around blood-brain barrier modeling that led to novel hiPSC-derived models of the cerebral Small Vessel Disease variants COL4A1/2 and HTRA1. These models were later used in a drug-screening collaboration with AstraZeneca. The project was funded by the British Heart Foundation, Alzheimer’s Association, Stroke Association and Medical Research Foundation.

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. Prasanna R Kolatkar graduated in structural biology from the University of Texas at Austin in 1991. He has worked in the Michael Rossmann laboratory at Purdue University focusing on virus-receptor relationships. Dr. Kolatkar was also awarded the Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund fellowship by Purdue University. He has experience working at the Bioinformatics Center, Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, and Genome Institute of Singapore.

Dr. Kolatkar's current research involves understanding the molecular details of transcription factor (TF) complexes associated with stem cell biology with pancreatic development. His laboratory employs biochemistry and structural biology to discover how TFs generate function through combinatorial interactions.

Dr. Ameni Boumaiza is currently working as a Scientist at Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute (QEERI), Hamad Bin Khalifa University. She is serving as a Project Lead of the PV Adoption and Trade project under the Energy Management Program and has worked on several projects funded by the Qatar National Research Fund. Her primary research focus is on Solar Energy management and smart systems based on AI. She has completed several studies on solar PV adoption, techno-economic modeling of energy systems and energy trading applications based on the Blockchain technology.

Prior to joining HBKU/QEERI, Dr. Ameni Boumaiza received a full PhD merit-based scholarship from the Ministry of Higher Education and Research in France. She got her PhD in 2013 in Computer Engineering from the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation INRIA and the University of Lorrain, France and from the Computer Vision Center CVC in UAB Barcelona, Spain. She has held various positions in academia and industry in France. She was a part of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission Institute CEA-List and the Vision and Content Engineering Lab LVIC in Saclay, Paris, France. Having benefited from closed interactions with laboratories, companies such as CEA-LVIC, INRIA, Thales, she got a strong background in artificial intelligence, renewable energy systems, computer vision, machine learning and robotics.

Her scientific research focuses on strategies addressing energy systems, artificial intelligence, robotics, image processing data science with an emphasis on data mining and machine learning and evaluative techniques to create solutions to complex challenges. She is specialized in software development modeling, simulation, testing, and quality assurance. She managed complex technical BI projects and collaborated directly with global engineering and research teams to create business intelligence solutions, and identify and assess new technologies prior to the software implementation. 

Christos Fountoukis received his PhD from the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering of the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta, U.S. in 2007. He has been a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow from 2008-2012 and a Project Scientist from 2012-2015 with the University of Patras and the FORTH research institute in Greece. Over the last 20 years he has participated in 15 large-scale integrated projects of the EU and the USA. He has more than 50 journal publications, h-index=30 and 4,304 citations (as of August 2022).

At QEERI, Christos is a Technical Team Leader for the atmospheric research modeling team within the Air Quality & Climate Change research program under the Environment and Sustainability Center. His research focuses on the application of air quality and climate models in the greater region of the Middle East with a special focus on the State of Qatar. He is also interested in atmospheric dust and solar energy forecasting and their effects on PV systems and solar power generation potential. Working closely with the measurement groups, the goal is to better understand the local and regional atmospheric conditions in order to identify efficient mitigation strategies toward a sustainable environment.

Dr. Bouhali received his PhD in Science from the Universite Libre de Bruxelles in 1999. Since 1994 he has participated in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment program at the Large Hadron Collider Project (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear and Particle Physics (CERN). He was also a member of the fixed target experiment HERMES at the Deutsches Electronen Synchrotron (DESY) and a member of the AMANDA/ICECUBE neutrino telescopes at the South Pole. His field of expertise includes: charged particle detectors, high energy and medical physics and high performance computing. He is Director of Research Computing and Research Associate Professor at Texas A&M University at Qatar.

He is the founder of the TAMU-Q Advanced Scientific Computing (TASC) Center. He is affiliated with the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) in the computational Science and Engineering group. He also chairs the HPC committee at Education City. He has served on many national and international committees, chaired conferences and workshops. In 2015 he received the Faculty Dean’s Distinguished Achievement Award.

Dr. Jayaprakash Saththasivam is a Senior Scientist at Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute of Hamad Bin Khalifa University. He graduated with First Class Honors (Mechanical-Aeronautics Engineering) from the University Teknologi Malaysia in 2005 and with a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the National University of Singapore (2011). Before joining QEERI, Dr. Saththasivam served as a research scientist at the Water Desalination and Reuse Center, KAUST, and the National University of Singapore.

His research focuses on advancing the efficiency and sustainability of water treatment processes. Through the development and implementation of innovative technologies, Dr. Saththasivam strives to bridge the gap between laboratory research and practical applications. His passion lies in validating and scaling up advanced technologies in pilot-scale studies to deliver real-world solutions for water challenges.

Dr. Khaled Mahmoud is Senior Scientist in Water Chemistry and Nanotechnology at the Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute (QEERI). Prior joining QEERI, he worked as Research Officer in Biosensors and Nanobiotechnology at the Biotechnology Research Institute/National Research Council (CNRC), Montreal, Canada. He was the Director of Science & Technology at Bio Vision Technology Inc., Montreal, and an Assistant Professor at Faculty of Engineering, Port Said University. He obtained his PhD in Materials Science from University of Saskatchewan, Canada (2007) and MSc in Analytical Chemistry from Suez Canal University, Egypt (2003) 

Dr Mahmoud research interest focus on the engineering and synthesis of functionalized nanomaterials for multidisciplinary applications including sustainable water treatment, energy storage, solar energy, environmental monitoring, nanocatalysis, and enhanced oil recovery applications. He is specialized in the synthesis and surface functionalization of 2D- carbon nanomaterials including MXene, graphenes, cellulose nanocrystals, and metal oxides.

Dr. Mahmoud is a member of the American Chemical Society (ACS), Canadian Society for Chemistry (CSC), Cellulose and Renewable Materials, ACS Colloids and Surface Sciences. He is co-author of 46 peer-reviewed papers, 5 book chapters, 2 patents, and 3 patent applications. He is recipient of The Excellence Award, NRC Montréal, Canada (2011); NSERC fellow, CNRC Canada.