Abderrezak Bouchama

Chairman, Experimental Medicine Department

Abderrezak Bouchama is a critical care physician-scientist and Chairman of the Experimental Medicine Department at the King Abdullah International Medical Research Center (KAIMRC) in Riyadh, part of the Ministry of National Guard Health Affairs and King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences. He holds an MD and board-equivalent training in critical care medicine from University Paris VII, together with a Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches from its Xavier Bichat Medical School. His research program centers on heat illness and heat stroke — pathophysiology, treatment and prevention — alongside sepsis and the immune response to stress. He co-authored the landmark New England Journal of Medicine review on heat stroke in 2002 and the 2022 Nature Reviews Disease Primers review on classic and exertional heatstroke, and has led whole-genome transcriptomic studies of heat stroke patients as well as animal models of the condition. His work has been cited more than 13,000 times, with an h-index of 47.