Dr. Mohamad Fathy Saoud, Ph.D.
President and Member of the Board of Directors
Qatar Foundation
Dr. Mohamad Fathy Saoud was appointed President of Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development (QF) in November 2007. He has been a member of the Board of Directors since 2003 and previously served as Higher Education Advisor from 1997-2007 where he participated in the planning and development of Education City, one of the largest projects of the Foundation.
As a member of the Academic Team of the Foundation, he was engaged in the discussions that led to the agreement with Cornell University in 2001 to establish a branch campus of Weill Cornell Medical College in Education City. He also led negotiations with Virginia Commonwealth University, Texas A&M University, RAND, Carnegie Mellon University and Georgetown University to establish branch campuses in Education City which now offer Design Arts, Engineering, Public Policy Research, Computer Sciences and Business, as well as Foreign Service Programs. He participated in the initial planning of the Science and Technology Park and Qatar National Research Fund, together with a major project for reforming K-12 schooling in Qatar. He has been also engaged in establishing a branch campus of the College of North Atlantic in Qatar and the University of Calgary Nursing Program in Qatar.
Dr. Saoud represents QF on the Joint Advisory Boards of WCMC-Q, TAMU-Q, and CMU-Q. He is the Vice Chairperson of the Board of Governors for Sidra Medical and Research Center (SMRC), and he chairs the Executive Committee of the SMRC and the Steering Committee of QNRF. He also is a member of the Steering Committee of University of Calgary Nursing Program in Qatar and the Executive Committee of the College of North Atlantic in Qatar.
Dr. Saoud started his academic career as Senior Lecturer, Assistant Professor, Associate Professor and Professor of Parasitology at the University of Ain Shams in Egypt and the University of Khartoum in Sudan and then joined the newly established University of Qatar where he became the founding Dean of Science in 1978. He was the Co Principal Investigator of a collaborative NIH funded research project on schistosomiasis in Egypt between the University of Ain Shams, the University of Lowell, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of California Los Angeles. During his research career, Dr. Saoud established a school in Medical and Animal Parasitology in Egypt, Sudan and Qatar; with more than 30 Masters and Ph.D. students working under his direct supervision.
He has published more than 100 papers in Parasitology and Immunology in the UK, USA, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Czech Republic, Egypt, Japan and Qatar. An Egyptian citizen, Dr. Saoud graduated in 1959 from Ain Shams University in Cairo with an Honors degree and earned a Ph.D. from the London School of Tropical Medicine, London University in 1965. Dr. Saoud is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene and a member of the British, Japanese and Egyptian Societies for Parasitology.