The Future of mRNA Technology
Presented by Nature Middle East

Mohamed Boudjelal is the chairman of King Abdullah International Medical Research Center (KAIMRC) core facility and Drug Discovery Unit. Mohamed has more than 25 years of experience in drug discovery and is a member of the Algerian Science Technology Council under the Algerian Presidency. Prior to joining KAIMRC, Mohamed was a group leader at GlaxoSmithKline in the Biological Reagents and Assay Development for preclinical drug discovery programmes.

Mohamed also held a position as an associate director for preclinical drug discovery in Incyte Pharmaceutical, USA, and worked as a scientist at the Institute of Genetic and Molecular and Cellular Biology, Strasbourg, France, and as a senior research associate at the University of Michigan, USA. Mohamed holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology from University of Leeds, UK, and a diploma in International Business and vocal education from University of California in San Diego. He is a recipient of several awards for scientific research excellence from Dermatology Foundation, American Association for Cancer Research and GSK exceptional science award.

Menattallah Elserafy is an assistant professor at Center for Genomics, Zewail City of Science and Technology. She is also a lecturer of undergraduate and postgraduate students at Zewail City. Menattallah did her MSc and PhD in Heidelberg University in Germany. She started her postdoctoral research at Center for Genomics in 2015 and was appointed as a faculty member in 2020. During her postdoctoral time, she has received the L’Oreal-UNESCO fellowship for women in science, Egypt and Levant in addition to the International Rising Talents fellowship by L’Oreal-UNESCO.

Menattallah is a Next Einstein Forum (NEF) fellow, an African Academy of Sciences (AAS) affiliate and a member of the Egyptian young academy of sciences (EYAS). She is also a global young academy (GYA) member and a co-lead of the women in science working group.

Afaf studied chemistry at Suez Canal University (Egypt) and did her PhD research at Southampton University where she developed a novel route to the synthesis of triflouroacetyl aromatic molecules starting from heterocyclic compounds. After her PhD, she moved back to Egypt to become a lecturer then promoted to associate professor in 2009 then professor in 2014 at Suez University.

Afaf is on a long term sabbatical working at the chemistry department in Oxford University on the use of click chemistry to assemble novel long modified biocompatible DNA and RNA constructs for modified gene synthesis/editing and on new methods of modified DNA synthesis and its applications in biology and medicine (diagnostics and therapeutics). She has collaborators from Oxford and around the world and some of the reagents she developed are commercially available. Afaf is very passionate about science and has more than 150 publications including high impact factor journals, patents and book’s chapters.

Mohammed Yahia is the executive editor of Nature Portfolio in the Middle East, which is part of Springer Nature. He joined 11 years ago as the launch editor of Nature Middle East, an online portal that focuses on science and science-related news from the Arab world. He now works with the editorial teams of several publications in the Middle East and Europe, including Nature Italy, Nature Arabic Edition and For Science, the Arabic version of Scientific American.

Mohammed is also the past president of the World Federation of Science Journalists (WFSJ) and has been the vice president of the Arab Science Journalists Association for the past four years.