Ammira Al-Shabeeb Akil

Director and Lead Principal Investigator

Dr Ammira Al-Shabeeb Akil is Principal Investigator and lead of the Metabolic and Mendelian Clinical-Translational Research Programmes, and Head of the Precision Genomics and Translational Omics Lab, at Sidra Medicine in Qatar. Since joining Sidra in 2015 she has helped establish national genomics initiatives for rare disease and diabetes, including NOOR-QATAR, the country's first large-scale newborn genome-screening programme, the DANNA cohort, the first well-characterised regional clinical cohort for type 1 diabetes spanning children, adults and their families, and the Qatar Mendelian Disorders Cohort. She also leads DIA-MENA, a national initiative on genomics and islet-autoantibody screening for type 1 diabetes, and collaborates with international consortia including the International Consortium on Newborn Sequencing and INNODIA. She holds a PhD in molecular biology and genetics and an executive MBA, and earlier held academic and research posts at the University of New South Wales and the NSW Organ and Tissue Donation Service in Australia, and has secured more than six million dollars in competitive research funding.