Insights from Tunisia and Qatar Genome Projects was the eighth lecture of the Logical Reasoning in Human Genetics course, hosted by Columbia Global Centers | Tunis in partnership with Institut Pasteur de Tunis.
This lecture discussed the Tunisian experience in translating research findings into clinical settings mainly in the field of Oncology, with concrete success stories, and presented the "Genome Tunisia" & "Genome Qatar" projects by:
. Dr. Yosr Hamdi who holds a Ph.D. in Molecular Medicine from Laval University, Quebec, and is currently an Assistant Biologist at the Laboratory of Biomedical Genomics and Oncogenetics at Institut Pasteur de Tunis, Tunisia. Some of her research interests and activities concern: 1- Applications of high throughput sequencing methods in precision medicine; 2- Investigation of breast cancer genetic landscape in North African populations and evaluation of the impact on the response to conventional and targeted therapies.
. Dr. Hamdi Mbarek who obtained his Ph.D. in molecular and cellular biology at the University of Évry Val d'Essonne in Paris, France, and completed his first postdoctoral research on the genomics of complex diseases at the University of Tokyo in Japan and a second one on the genetics of psychiatric diseases and genetics of addiction at VU University in the Netherlands. He leads an international collaborative consortium, the Twinning Genetics Consortium, to study the genetics of twinning and birth weight in twins. After 30 years of research, Dr. Mbarek was the first scientist to find the first genes responsible for dizygotic twinning, and in 2016, his paper was cited in the media in more than 40 countries around the world. He is the Scientific and Industry Partnerships Manager at Qatar Genome.
We were also pleased to have among us:
Pr. Joseph Terwilliger, professor at the Department of Genetics and Development, Columbia University
Pr. Joseph H. Lee, Professor in Epidemiology at the Columbia University Medical Center, Columbia University
Pr. Ghada Elkameh, Professor of Clinical Genetics, Coordinator of the Hereditary Blood Disorders and Genodermatoses Clinics and Research Teams, Human Genetics and Genome Research Division, National Research Centre
Pr. Ryan Hernandez, Associate Professor, Bioengineering School of Pharmacy, University of California, San Francisco.
Dr. Sonia Abdelhak, Principal Biologist, Head of Research Unit, Institut Pasteur de Tunis.
Dr. Harald H. Göring., Bennett Dyke & Jean MacCluer Endowed Professor, the South Texas Diabetes and Obesity Institute & Department of Human Genetics, School of Medicine, San Antonio, Texas.
Dr. Markus Perola, Research Professor at the National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL), Helsinki, Finland.
