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.

Dr. Zeyaul Islam completed his Master’s (2006) from Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) India, and worked on protein folding problem where he exploited biophysical techniques to understand the stages/intermediates during protein folding. On completion, he joined the protein crystallography lab under the supervision of Dr. Subramanian Karthikeyan at the Institute of Microbial Technology for his doctrate. During this period he worked on understanding the structure-function relationship of the enzymes of Riboflavin/FAD biosynthesis pathway from Vibrio cholerae and used it as a template for structure-based drug designing for the development of specific drugs (completed in 2012). As a postdoctoral researcher he had the opportunity to combine his MSc and PhD experiences; he worked on molecular chaperones (proteins that assist in protein folding) in IISER, Bhopal, India. He has worked on various aspect of co-chaperone Hsp40s and their cellular role in Hsp70/Hsp40 network using protein biochemistry and structural biology approaches.

Dr. Islam secured the FAPESP postdoctoral fellowship in 2015 and worked with Dr. Andre LB Ambrosio, LNBio, CNPEM, Brazil. His project was titled, “Biophysical and biochemical studies of the human glutaminases (important in cancer metabolism) in complex with novel binding partners”. He also explored supratetrameic form (filamentous) of glutaminases by cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). He was also involved in human membrane protein characterization especially mitochondrial pyruvate carriers. He joined QBRI as a Postdoctoral Researcher in March, 2018.

Dr. Olfa Khalifa obtained her Master’s degree in Biology of Vascular Diseases from the faculty of Pharmacy of Montasir in Tunisia, in 2012 and a PhD in Genetics and Immunology from the University of Montpellier in France in 2016. As part of her work towards her doctorate, Dr. Khalifa investigated the role of new genes in rheumatoid arthritis. She is skilled in many molecular and cellular biology techniques including real time PCR, sanger sequencing, miRNA profiling, ACS, ELISA, cell culture, microarray, and other basic molecular biology techniques. Her Ph.D. work has been published in peer-reviewed international journals.

Dr. Khalifa joined QBRI in 2018 and is currently working with Dr. Arredouani. She is working on a project that investigates the molecular mechanisms that underlie the positive effect of GLP-1 agonist on non-alchoholic fatty liver disease.

Dr. Diane received his Master’s degree in Nutrition and Dietetics from Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, Senegal. He completed his PhD in Human Nutrition at AgroParisTech Institute, Paris (France). After completion of his doctoral degree in 2006, Dr. Diané was awarded a Postdoctoral Research Training Fellowship in Obesity/Healthy Body Weight Program from CIHR with an opportunity to work at the the Lipid Research Centre at Laval University in Quebec, Canada; here he worked on cardiovascular complications of diabetes from 2007-2008.

In November 2008, he joined the Metabolic and Cardiovascular Diseases Laboratory at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada as a Postdoctoral Researcher/Research Associate & Teaching Assistant for 8 years. He worked on many research projects investigating the impact of nutrition and pharmacotherapies on cardiometabolic risk in animal models of Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, metabolic syndrome, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases.

In 2014, he briefly joined (9 months) the Northern Medical Program, University of Northern British Columbia, Canada as a Postdoctoral Research Associate investigating the physiological and molecular mechanisms of the Pituitary Adenylate Cylase-Activating Polypeptide (PACAP) involved in adaptive thermogenesis.

In August 2017, he joined Dr. Dehbi’s group as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Diabetes Research Center of QBRI working on many projects related to the role of heat shock proteins, in the pathophysiology of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes.

Dr. Diané has extensive experience in pre-clinical animal models of chronic metabolic diseases. He will help in the setup of functional vivarium at QBRI, developing animal models of metabolic diseases.

Dr. Mariam Al-Muftah received her BSc in Medical Genetics (Honors) from the University of Wales in the United Kingdom in 2005 and pursued her post graduated education to complete a Master of Research (MRes) in Biological Sciences in 2007 and a PhD of Medicine (cancer immunotherapy) as a joint project between the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute and the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. Her PhD project was focused on the use of a fully autologous mouse model to study immune regulation towards 5T4 targeted immunotherapies. Furthermore, she focused on the generation of novel chimeric antigen receptors against the tumor associated antigen 5T4.

After completing her doctoral degree in 2011, she became a lecturer of Biology at Qatar University and was later promoted to the rank of Assistant Professor. In February 2012, she was seconded to Qatar Biomedical Research Institute as a scientist to pursue her research interest. Recently, she completed an executive master program in Strategic Business Unit Management from HEC Paris University in Qatar. Dr. Mariam has taught several courses in general biology and molecular biology at the department of Biological and Environmental Sciences.

Dr. Nehad Alajez earned his PhD in tumour immunology from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in USA, and subsequently completed his post-doctoral training at the Princess Margaret Cancer Center (University Health Network), a premier cancer research institute in Canada. His main research interest is to investigate the role of the Polycomb gene family and non-coding microRNAs in driving cancer progression and their potential utilization for targeted therapies. Dr. Alajez is a recipient of several prestigious awards and has published more than 100 articles in top-tier ISI-indexed journals including Blood, Cancer Research, Cell Death and Differentiation, Cell Death and Disease, Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy, Molecular Therapy (family journals), EMBO Molecular Medicine, and in Science Translational Medicine. Dr. Alajez currently has close to 5000 citations and an h-index of 35 and i10-index of 74.

Prior to his current appointment, Dr. Alajez was appointed as the Associate Professor at King Saud University College of Medicine, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Dr. Alajez’s main research interests are focused on ‘translational oncology research’ with main emphasis on novel biomarker discovery and targeted therapeutics for breast cancers. In particular, Dr. Alajez’s team is studying noncoding RNAs (micoRNAs and lncRNAs) as disease and predictive biomarkers for patients’ response to therapy. Dr. Alajez has strong expertise in transcriptome analysis, noncoding RNAs, and biomarker discovery field and is currently ranked among the top 2% most cited scientist globally. He is a recipient of several major grants, including funding from Qatar National Research Fund, in addition to his editorial roles on several journals.

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. Omar El-Agnaf is considered a pioneer in the field of Parkinson’s and related neurodegenerative diseases. He was awarded his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Biochemistry in 1997 at Queen’s University Belfast, UK. Between 1997 to 1999, he worked as a postdoctoral scientist at the School of Biology and Biochemistry, Queen’s University Belfast. Following this, Dr. El-Agnaf undertook an additional two-year post-doctoral position at St. George’s Medical School in London. In 2001, he was awarded a Research Fellowship from the Parkinson’s Disease Society-UK to establish his research group at Lancaster University. After completing his Research Fellowship in 2004, Dr. El-Agnaf joined the College of Medicine at UAE University and was appointed to the Biochemistry Department. In September 2014, he joined Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU) at Qatar Foundation (QF), and in 2016 he was appointed Acting Executive Director of Qatar Biomedical Research Institute (QBRI), part of HBKU, and became the Executive Director (2018 - 2022).

Dr. El-Agnaf has successfully directed QBRI’s efforts towards translational research to improve and transform healthcare through innovations in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of diseases affecting Qatar and the region. Under his leadership, QBRI has realized significant achievements. This has included securing extramural research funding to establish robust alliances with biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies to winning the 2017 Arab Best Research Institution of the Year Award.

Since his move to the region in 2004, Dr. El-Agnaf has assembled an excellent research team that has positioned itself at the forefront of neuroscience research internationally, building a reputable portfolio in the Middle East and beyond, and has been successful in attracting an array of scientific funding from prestigious international funding agencies. Individually, his discoveries have greatly impacted the scientific research community, provided further insight into the molecular pathogenesis of Parkinson’s disease, and offered new opportunities for the development of novel diagnostic and therapeutic tools for the disease. 

Dr. El-Agnaf is frequently invited as a speaker at international scientific and clinical meetings and is currently a member of the editorial boards of several international journals. Publications in high-ranking scientific journals validate Dr. El-Agnaf's track record of superior basic and translational research productivity. He has published nearly 137 refereed articles, with citations exceeding 13,350 (to date), and possesses an h-index of 61.