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Dr. Nour al-dain Marzouka is a Research Scientist at the Center for Biotechnology (BTC) at Khalifa University (KU), United Arab Emirates. Dr. Marzouka's background and experience paved the way to his current position at KU, where he continues to explore the field of bioinformatics and genetics by contributing to groundbreaking projects such as the Emirati Reference Genome Project, exploring the HLA landscape in UAE, and developing new methodologies in animal genomics.
Dr Marzouka's research journey began with a scholarship from Erasmus Mundus, which alluded to pursuing advanced Biology and Health (Human Genetics) studies at Montpellier 2 University, France, where he earned his Ph.D. degree in 2014. In his PhD thesis, he uncovered novel mutations and identified new candidate genes associated with Retinitis pigmentosa. Remarkably, he also identified the first gene linked to a particular age-related macular dystrophy (called EMAP).
After completing his PhD degree, Dr. Marzouka undertook two years of postdoctoral studies at Uppsala University, Sweden, where he explored the interesting domains of epigenetics, cancer, and autoimmune diseases. Additionally, he assessed the EPIC methylation array and explored the possibilities of utilizing methylation arrays in cancer research, where he developed approaches and R packages to correct the copy number data derived from methylation arrays and other technologies.
With an ever-growing passion for cancer genomics, he joined Lund University in Sweden as a researcher and bioinformatician, where he had very focused five productive research years into to the field of cancer classification and associated methodologies. During this period, Dr. Marzouka made significant and impactful contributions with the design, development, and implementation of his bladder cancer classifier in clinical setting in the Southern of Sweden.
Dr Marzouka's research journey continued in orchestration in bioinformatics as he worked closely with the Emirati Genome Project (EGP) as a clinical bioinformatician at G42 Healthcare in the UAE. This experience not only enriched his expertise in diverse topics (such as clinical reporting, CAP and ISO accreditation, and next generation sequencing technologies, including long reads), but also yielded with a significant achievement with the initiation of the pharmacogenomics (PGx) workflow.
Dr. Heba Saadeh is currently an Associate Professor in Epigenetics and Bioinformatics at the Computer Science department, of the University of Jordan, Jordan. Heba had worked as an Associate Researcher at the Babraham Institute (jointly in the Bioinformatics and the Epigenetics groups), Cambridge University, UK. Dr. Saadeh is specialist in analysing next generation sequencing data, like Bisulphite sequencing, RNA-seq and ChIP-seq in addition to microarrays. Heba has deep research interest in relation to understanding the impact of hypoxia on gene expression in different cancer types. She has also further key research interests in general epigenetics, bioinformatics and data science applied in medical and biological contexts.
Dr. Saadeh obtained her Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from King’s College London, UK and M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Jordan. She has been a lecturer and dissertations’ examiner for the 1st international MSc in Cancer Care Informatics programme jointly run by King Hussain Cancer Center (KHCC - the host) in Jordan and the University of Jordan, Jordan.