Fowzan S Alkuraya is a Professor of Human Genetics at Alfaisal University and the Chairman of the Department of Translational Genomics at King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center.  He joined medical school (King Saud University) before turning 15 and graduated first in his class with first class honor.  He did his pediatric residency at Georgetown University Hospital, followed by a fellowship in clinical genetics and another in molecular genetics at Harvard Medical School.  He also did a postdoctoral research fellowship in the area of developmental genetics in the lab of Prof. Richard Maas at Harvard Medical School. 

He returned to his native Saudi Arabia to establish the Developmental Genetics Lab, which later evolved into the Center for Genomic Medicine at KFSHRC.  He is an authority in the area of Mendelian genetics with more than 480 published manuscripts that describe his lab’s discovery of hundreds of novel disease genes in humans as well as many other seminal contributions to the field of human genetics as featured in profiles published by The Lancet and Science.  He is a frequently invited speaker at local, regional and international conferences, on the editorial board of prominent human genetics journals, and the recipient of numerous prestigious awards including William King Bowes Award in Medical Genetics (first non-US based winner), King Salman Award for Disability Research and Curt Stern Award (first non-US based winner).