Dr. Khalid A. Fakhro

Dr. Khalid A. Fakhro is the Acting Chief Research Officer and Director of the Precision Medicine Program at Sidra Medicine, where he heads a program that focuses on research in genomics and personalized medicine. He also holds adjunct faculty appointments at both Weill Cornell Medicine in Qatar and Hamad bin Khalifa University, where he teaches classes and mentors Masters and PhD students in human genetics and genomic medicine.

The research that his department conducts at Sidra Medicine focuses on identifying genetic variants that are responsible for rare and complex disorders in the country, genetic mapping of diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, autism, cancer and the corona virus, and looking at the genomic structure of Arab populations, which are severely under-represented in global databases.

Dr. Fakhro joined Sidra Medicine as a Principal Investigator in July 2014, and became Director of the Human Genetics department, where he built a robust genomic medicine research pipeline for the hospital. In 2018, he became the inaugural Director of Precision Medicine at Sidra, heading an ambitious program where research in genomics and personalized medicine are embedded in the heart of Sidra Medicine’s academic medical enterprise. Prior to joining Sidra Medicine, Dr. Fakhro was part of the Department of Genetic Medicine at Weill-Cornell Medicine in Qatar.

Dr. Fakhro graduated with Honors from the University of Chicago, majoring in Biological Sciences with specialization in Cellular Biology and Molecular Genetics and later completed his PhD in Human Genetics at Yale University.