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A Libyan pharmacologist treating HIV patients in South Africa and a Tunisian scientist purifying water in Malaysia.
This is the story of two world-renowned scientists who left their homelands of Libya and Tunisia and went on to achieve great success in South Africa and Malaysia.
Libyan pharmacologist Mohamed Irhuma studied in South Africa but faced a range of challenges when his home country went through its 2011 revolution. He’s achieved success in South African HIV AIDS pharmacology, including award-winning work on drug treatments.
Tunisian chemical engineer Mohamed Kheireddine Aroua is a world expert in material separation, inventing a life-changing water purification machine which benefits remote villages.
Both stories illustrate some of the complexities of being an Arab abroad, and the journeys of two remarkable scientists.
Prominent pathologist Doctor Sherif Zaki, founder and chief of the Infectious Disease Pathology Branch in the Coordinating Centre for Infectious Diseases in Atlanta, Georgia, passed away on 21 November, 2021.
Dr. Zaki was renowned for cracking medical mysteries by finding signatures of pathogens in diseased cells.
Through the application of classic and new technologies, Dr. Zaki and his team have made significant contributions to advancing the understanding of the pathogenesis and epidemiology of emerging infectious diseases.
Moreover, for his leadership, scientific contributions and commitment to Centre for Disease Control’s (CDC) public health mission, Dr. Zaki has been widely recognised and awarded, including receiving the US Health and Human Services Secretary’s Awards for Distinguished Service – the department’s highest honour – nine times.
Dr. Zaki and his staff were the first to identify the Hanta virus, later called the Sin Nombre virus, that caused the deaths of several people in the Navajo nation in the Southwest in 1993.
He also helped discover the Zika virus in the brain tissue of babies stricken with the mosquito-borne virus in Brazil, proving that it could be transmitted during pregnancy.
Dr. Zaki also helped identify the mechanisms that made Ebola and SARS so contagious and lethal.
Sherif Ramzy Zaki was born 24 November 1955, in Alexandria, Egypt.
He spent the first six years of his life in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where his father was attending graduate school.
Dr. Zaki received his medical degree from Alexandria University in 1978, before earning a master’s degree at his alma mater in pathology.
He earned a doctorate in experimental pathology from Emory University in Atlanta in 1989.
Dr. Zaki’s data on Scopus database showed that Zaki had published in the neighborhood of 400 scientific papers and had an advanced “H score” of 102 thus placing his impact on the field way above the 35-70 range for Noble Prize hopefuls.
Two Saudi Women Asrar Damdam and Lama Al-Abdi recently won awards from the L’Oreal-UNESCO for Women in Science Middle East Regional Young Talents Program for their work.
Dr. Asrar Damdam, was honored in the Ph.D. students’ category for her role in the development of a pump meant to revolutionize the way a healthy heartbeat is regulated — combining medicine, electrical engineering and electro-physics.
Dr. Lama Al-Abdi in recognition of her research on chromatin — a substance within chromosomes consisting of DNA and protein — and the regulation of genes in relation to vision loss.
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pix: twitter ( L t R) Dr. Lama AlAbdi and Dr. Asrar Damdam
