Ahmad Abou Tayoun (Chair)

Ahmad Abou Tayoun is the Director of the Genomics Center of Excellence at Al Jalila Children’s, and an Associate Professor of Genetics at Mohammed Bin Rashid University of Medicine and Health Sciences. He completed his doctoral studies in genetics at Dartmouth College, followed by a fellowship in molecular diagnostics at Dartmouth Medical School. In 2013, he joined Harvard Medical School where he completed his clinical molecular genetics fellowship and, in 2015, became board-certified by the American Board of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ABMGG). Dr Abou Tayoun is a fellow of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMGG). Prior to joining Al Jalila Children’s, he was a director in the Division of Genomic Diagnostics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and also an assistant professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. At Al Jalila Children’s, Dr Abou Tayoun established the Genomics Center of Excellence, the first comprehensive, CAP-accredited pediatric genomic diagnostics facility in the UAE.

Dr Abou Tayoun’s main research interests are centered around characterizing the genomic landscape of rare pediatric diseases in the Middle East and cataloguing the normal genetic variation in this population. In addition, his research focuses on implementing new technologies or approaches to enable faster and more effective genomic diagnostics in the Middle East. Dr Abou Tayoun serves on several expert groups in his field. He is a co-chair of the Clinical Genome Resource (ClinGen) Hearing Loss Expert Group, a member of the ClinGen Sequence Variant Interpretation (SVI) group, a member of the American College of Genetics and Genomics Interpreting Sequence Variants (ISV) workgroup, and an associate member of the Human Pangenome Consortium. In those capacities, Dr Abou Tayoun is working with international experts to establish guidelines and recommendations for sequence variant interpretation in genomic diagnostic settings. He has authored or co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications in his field.