Khalid Fakhro

Chief Medical Genomics Leader

A Qatari geneticist serving as Chief Research Officer at Sidra Medicine in Doha and Director of its Precision Medicine programme, where he leads the Laboratory of Human Genetics and Genomics. He graduated with honours from the University of Chicago in biological sciences, specialising in cellular biology and molecular genetics, and earned a PhD in human genetics from Yale University as part of the highly selective HHMI Translational Medicine Scholars programme. Before that he worked in the Department of Genetic Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar. He joined Sidra as a principal investigator in July 2014, went on to direct its Human Genetics department where he built a genomic medicine research pipeline, and in 2018 became the inaugural Director of Precision Medicine. His work focuses on identifying genetic variants behind rare and complex disorders, genetic mapping of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, autism and cancer, and studying the genomic architecture of Arab populations, which remain severely under-represented in global databases. He holds adjunct faculty appointments at Weill Cornell Medicine and Hamad Bin Khalifa University.