Dr. Mohamed H. Sayegh, MD
Senior Scientific Advisor to the Director at NIAID/NIH

Dr. Sayegh studied medicine at the American University of Beirut (AUB) before completing his Internal Medicine residency at Cleveland Clinic Foundation and clinical fellowship in Renal Medicine/Transplantation Immunobiology at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston (BWH). By 2005, he was an endowed Chair of Transplantation Medicine and served as Director of the Schuster Family Transplantation Research Center at BWH and Boston Children’s Hospital. Dr. Sayegh later returned to AUB as the Raja N. Khuri Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Executive Vice President for Medicine and Global Strategy.

In his current position, he coordinates the NIAID-MENAT initiative aimed at promoting NIH-funded, collaborating research in the MENAT (Middle East, North Africa, and Türkiye) region. In addition, he is a current member of the University of Sharjah Board of Trustees and of the newly-formed Academy of Arab Scientists of the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences.

Prof. Mohammed Yousuf Karim, MBBChir FRCP FRCPath
Chief, Division of Hematology/Immunology/Transfusion, Sidra Medicine and Clinical Professor in Immunopathology, Qatar University

Yousuf studied medicine at Cambridge University and Guy’s & St Thomas’ Hospitals, qualifying in 1993 with Distinctions in Medicine and Pathology. He was Clinical Lecturer in Immunology at King’s College London 1998-2004, Consultant Immunologist at Surrey Pathology Services 2004-18 and Clinical Lead in Immunology at Guy's & St Thomas' Hospitals, London 2006-14. He has authored 90 publications and chapters, and received grant awards totaling £2.5 million. He was Chair of the Clinical Immunology Committee of the British Society for Allergy and Clinical Immunology 2014-17, and is currently Country Advisor for Qatar for the Royal College of Pathologists. In 2018, he was senior author on recommendations for hypogammaglobulinemia secondary to B-cell therapies, and has current grants studying immunodeficiency after rituximab in autoimmunity. He is co-Lead of the Sidra Immune Dysregulation Clinical Research Program.

Dr. Bernice Lo, PhD
Principal Investigator, Head of Laboratory of Immunogenetics & Immunoregulation;
Program Lead for Immune Dysregulation Program, Research Department, Sidra Medicine

Bernice obtained her Ph.D. in Cell and Molecular Biology at Duke University in the United States. And trained for her post-doc fellowship at the National Institutes of Health in the US, studying genetic disorders of the immune system, where she has helped discover new genetic immune dysregulation disorders. Since then, she has established her lab at Sidra Medicine and has been contributing to the discovery, diagnosis, and molecular understanding of inherited immune disorders in the region. In 2023, she was nominated to establish and lead the Sidra Immune Dysregulation Clinical Research Program.