Sufana AlMashhadi

Director of Innovation

Sufana AlMashhadi is a Saudi neuroscience researcher working at the Saudi National Institute of Health in Riyadh. She holds a bachelor's degree in applied medical sciences, clinical laboratory medicine, from King Saud University, and completed a master's degree in molecular and cellular neuroscience followed by a PhD at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, where she also held a post-doctoral research fellowship in stem cells. She was subsequently awarded a fellowship in ageing diseases at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston through the Ibn Khaldun Fellowship programme, completed an executive certificate in management and leadership at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and studied organisational leadership at Harvard Medical School. Her research career has centred on neuroscience, neurodegenerative disease and Alzheimer's, including genome dysfunction mechanisms and the use of induced pluripotent stem cell technology for disease modelling, and she served as chief researcher in neuroscience at King Fahad Medical City in Riyadh from 2016 before moving into innovation leadership. Her current work addresses innovation in health and research and its role in developing the health sector, including the impact of artificial intelligence in medicine, and she has spoken at forums such as the Women in Science and Engineering conference at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in 2023.