Prof. Rifat Hamoudi was recently elected to serve as a member of the “National Strategic Framework for SARS-CoV2 Virus (COVID-19) Genetic Sequence Surveillance in the United Arab Emirates” committee, which includes members from other UAE universities and government institutions with outstanding contributions to the research effort to combat COVID-19. Prof. Hamoudi’s team produced multidisciplinary research that identified a set of novel biomarkers correlating with COVID-19 severity, which resulted in two key publications in the World Journal of Gastroenterology and Frontiers in Immunology.

The research was carried out by Ph.D. student Ms. Sarah Hammoudeh and was led by Prof. Rifat Hamoudi in collaboration with Prof. Rabih Halwani, Prof. Qutayba Hamid, and Dr. Mohammed Rahmani. This work is supported by the University of Sharjah COVID-19 grant (No: CoV19-0308) entitled “The use of bioinformatics and engineering mathematics followed by biological in vitro and in vivo validation to decipher the molecular mechanism of COVID-19 infection of the respiratory tract”.