Prof. Fowzan Alkuraya is a Professor of Human Genetics at Faisal University and a Senior Consultant and Principal Clinical Scientist at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Center (KFSHRC), Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Professional Milestones
At a young age, Prof. Fowzan began his medical studies at King Saud University and later graduated with first-class honors. He did his pediatric residency at Georgetown University Hospital, followed by fellowships in clinical and molecular genetics at Harvard Medical School. He also did a postdoctoral research fellowship in the area of developmental genetics in the lab of Prof. Richard Maas at Harvard Medical School.
Research
Prof. Alkuraya has accomplished several remarkable scientific achievements in the field of human and medical genetics during the last decade and is an authority in Mendelian genetics. In 2007, he established the Developmental Genetics Lab and the Mendelian Genomics Program at the KFSHRC.
He has published hundreds of scientific papers that described his laboratory's discovery of hundreds of novel disease genes in humans, as well as many other seminal contributions to the field of human genetics. Through his work on the "autozygome, he recognized the particular population structure of Saudi Arabia that made it possible to use regions of homozygosity to arrive at an accurate map of the morbid human genome for the benefit of humanity; the thing that highlights the global appeal of his work.
Prof. Alkuraya has also taken his clinical observations into basic research. His work has a wide range of human genetics applications, whether genome-wide association studies to drug development. His efforts to understand human genetic disease have led to the discovery of novel mechanisms of Mendelian variants.
He is a frequently invited speaker at local, regional, and international conferences and serves on the editorial board of prominent human genetics journals. He is also a Member of the Arab Council of the Centre for Arab Genomic Studies.
Awards & Recognitions
Prof. Alkuraya is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards like the William King Bowes Award in Medical Genetics and the King Salman Award for Disability Research. In 2020, the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) named him the Society Curt Stern Award recipient, which recognizes genetics and genomics researchers who have made significant scientific contributions during the past decade.
In recognition to his achievements and contributions to Human Genetics and medical field, Professor Alkuraya is awarded the Hamdan Award for honoring Distinguished Personalities from the Arab World for the term 2021-2022.
