I am an Associate Professor of at the Department of Human Genetics at the Leiden University Medical Center, and an affiliated faculty at TU Delft, Netherlands.
I am interested in understanding how genetic and environmental factors influence the molecular state of cells. My current research focuses on developing algorithms and machine learning methods for single-cell and spatial genomic data analysis, with particular emphasis on cell type identification, multi-modal data integration, and transcriptional regulation.
I grew up in Cairo, where I earned my bachelor’s in Systems and Biomedical Engineering from Cairo University in 2008, followed by a master's in Communication and Information Technology from Nile University in 2010. I earned my PhD in bioinformatics from the TU Delft, Netherlands, in 2016 followed by a postdoc at the Leiden Computational Biology Center before starting my own lab at Department of Human Genetics in 2019.
I received the BioSB Young Investigator Award in 2017 for the best systems biology and bioinformatics thesis in the Netherlands, and the CJ Kok Award in 2022, a mid-career research excellence award from the LUMC. I am also the founder and chair of the Single Cell Network Netherlands as well as the current chair of the Young Academy Leiden (YAL).
Education
PhD, Faculty of Engineering Mathematics and Computer Science (2016)
Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands)
MSc, Communications and Information Technology (2010)
Nile University (Egypt)
BSc, Systems and Biomedical Engineering (2008)
Cairo University (Egypt)