Dr. Raefa Abou Khouzam

Dr. Raefa Abou Khouzam has a Ph.D. in “Genetics, Molecular and Cellular Biology” from the University of Pavia, Italy. She was awarded an Erasmus Mundus Action 2-Dunia Beam Scholarship to pursue this Ph.D. in the Laboratory of Human Genetics-Cancer Genetics, where she worked for three years on investigating novel molecular players and genetic alterations and their phenotypic associations in gastrointestinal cancer. In the year that followed, she was awarded the IGM-CNR fellowship to pursue a one-year post-doc with the Genome Stability Group at the Institute of Molecular Genetics-National Research Council (IGM-CNR) again in Pavia, Italy, where she applied a wide range of techniques to study the effect of kinase inhibitors on DNA repair in cell lines. Since then, she has become an assistant professor and research scientist at the Thumbay Research Institute of Precision Medicine (TRIPM), Gulf Medical University. Her research interest lies in investigating hypoxia, which is a determinantal condition of low oxygen tension in the microenvironment of solid tumors, with the aim of unraveling molecular factors that could aid in cancer patient’s diagnosis, prognosis and treatment. Her active research career for the past 9 years has generated several publications in peer-reviewed journals and earned her collaborative works with institutes in Lebanon, Italy and France.