These women scientists are finding solutions to the Middle East’s biggest challenges

Not every scientific breakthrough begins with a eureka moment. Sometimes, it starts with a desert plant that manages to draw moisture from air that seems completely bone dry. Other times, it comes from wondering why a drug helps one patient but not another.

The six scientists honored this year by L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science are working on interesting areas of research. They are looking at how we can combat respiratory viruses, image the human body, build medicine around individual biology, harvest water from the air, and extract value from industrial waste. They are based in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, and Syria, and what unites them is not a single field of science but a belief that science developed in the context of this region, to meet the needs of this region, can have a very significant impact beyond the region itself.

THINKING BEHIND THE SCIENCE

Hadeel Tarik Zedan, a biomedical researcher at Qatar University, says there was no single moment that defined her path, but one turning point made everything else seem less important. “What really stuck with me was the sheer speed with which a virus could impact not just individual patients but entire health systems and communities,” she explains. That experience completely shifted the question she wanted to spend her career answering. “I went from asking ‘how does the virus affect us?’ to asking ‘how can we be better prepared to stop it?'”

Dr. Aljawharah Alrubayyi, Saudi infectious disease scientist at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, had a real pull towards her field which was very much rooted in her own experience. She grew up in Saudi Arabia and saw MERS emerge and spread through her own community. “Watching an emerging virus impact my own community really cemented my desire to understand how science could be used to better prepare societies for the next outbreak,” she says.

Alaa Mansour Almushaikeh, a Saudi applied physicist at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, was intrigued by a different problem altogether: the inherent compromise in X-ray imaging. Traditional scintillators are based on heavy metals, are quite rigid, can be quite expensive, and are difficult to make flexible. “I saw an opportunity to look at the material itself,” she says, “not just at the way we image but at what we image with.”

The sheer scale of it initially caught the attention of Jawaher Alhammadi, an Emirati medical engineer at Khalifa University of Science and Technology. “I was really intrigued by the notion that engineering doesn’t necessarily have to be about building something big or mechanical,” she explains. 

It was the interface between biology and electronics that grabbed her interest, the fact that cells are all the time sensing, communicating and responding and the idea of being able to measure that. “I’m not actually treating patients, I’m working on technologies that could ultimately provide clinicians with tools to help them understand disease and make treatment decisions.”

Dr. Marieh Bassam Al Handawi, a Syrian scientist at NYU Abu Dhabi, says her journey has been shaped by both circumstance and curiosity.  “I don’t see research as just a means to get papers or build a career,” she says. “For me, it’s a way of using the opportunities I’ve had to work on issues that matter to people and to future generations.” She focused on water scarcity, a pressing issue in the region.

Dr. Sara Al-Araimi, an Omani biotechnologist at the University of Technology and Applied Sciences, gradually found her direction. Her first real indication of where she was heading came from a project early in her career, which examined the conversion of potato peel waste into bioethanol. “That was one of the first projects that really changed the way I thought about waste,” she says. The idea that something normally discarded could be a feedstock for a renewable fuel was the seed of it all, and it became the bedrock of her career. “I don’t want my research to just be about describing an environmental problem. I want it to be about solving that problem and, if possible, recovering value at the same time.”

NATURE HAS SOME ANSWERS

One of the biggest gaps in antiviral research, according to Zedan, is timing. “We tend to start developing treatments after the virus has actually appeared rather than being in a position to be ready for it,” she says. COVID-19 has made that gap very obvious in real time, in terms of how rapidly viruses can evolve and how difficult it is to get new treatments to market in time. 

Her solution is to build platforms that don’t have to start from scratch each time. Her work uses siRNA to target conserved regions common to all related respiratory coronaviruses and delivers it via the nose using lipid nanoparticles. “The overarching concept is to build flexible antiviral platforms in advance so that when the next virus comes along, we’re not starting from zero.”

Dr. Alrubayyi is exploring a similar issue from the perspective of immunology. The immune system can remember a virus and respond more quickly if it encounters it again. This is the basic idea behind vaccines. However, viruses can change over time, and new variants may avoid the protection that vaccines provide. “One thing we can learn from the immune system is that some immune responses are able to recognize conserved regions of the virus (i.e., parts of the virus that don’t change) even as the virus evolves,” she says. “If we can design our vaccines to target those conserved regions, we could, in theory, get broader protection against different variants of the virus.”

Almushaikeh is tackling a different exposure issue. Her scintillator materials are at the very heart of X-ray imaging systems, converting invisible X-rays into visible light. The more efficiently they do that, the lower the radiation dose required to produce a good image. The tech is still in the research stage, but she’s already shown very good results at the material and imaging screening levels. “For the patient, the benefit is very straightforward: it’s high-quality X-ray imaging with lower radiation exposure,” she says. “That’s particularly important for children and for people who are going to be scanned quite frequently.”

Alhammadi is working on something new for clinical practice: a model of a patient’s biology that can be tested in the lab. “Personalized medicine is about moving away from the assumption that the same treatment will have the same effect in every patient,” she explains. She focuses on the cell membrane, which is the first point of contact between the cell and its environment. Her goal is to make models as complex as real cells, capable of connecting with bioelectronic sensors. “The long-term ambition would be to be able to create a model of an individual patient’s biology, expose it to a drug or a disease-relevant molecule, and then read the response electronically.”

Dr. Al Handawi draws her engineering principles straight from the desert. The plant Tamarix aphylla she found produces hygroscopic salts that can absorb substantial amounts of moisture directly from the air, even at quite low humidity levels. That’s something conventional desalination technology can’t do without a huge amount of energy. “For me, nature is a source of design principles,” she says. “If you understand how nature works, you can take those principles and apply them to create technologies that are more sustainable, lower energy, and better suited to the environment.”

Dr. Al-Araimi is rethinking the concept of waste. Her hybrid system combines bacteria and microalgae. The bacteria break down organic pollutants in wastewater, releasing electrons. Microalgae use CO2 and nutrients to grow, producing clean water and microalgal biomass that can be converted into various bio-based products.

“That shift from waste treatment to resource recovery is absolutely at the heart of my work,” she says. “We’re using biology to turn pollution into clean water and useful biological products and we’re also using the CO2 in the process.”

MADE FOR THE MIDDLE EAST

The region is in a better position than it was prior to Covid-19, Zedan says, but still not where it needs to be. Qatar has certainly enhanced its national health security and outbreak response capacity during the pandemic, and there’s a clear trend across the Middle East now toward integrated surveillance of a range of respiratory viruses rather than just one at a time. 

The issue she sees, though, is that detection is only half the story. “Preparedness is more than just being able to detect an outbreak when it occurs. One of the gaps I see is that we don’t have our antivirals ready before we need them.” The opportunity, in her view, is to invest now in flexible, broad-spectrum approaches that can be tested and prepared for in advance. That’s the move from being in the position of responding to an outbreak to being in a position of true antiviral preparedness.

Dr. Alrubayyi views the Gulf’s scientific moment in a very different light than the rest of us. Rather than seeing it as a gap to be filled, she sees it as a very real and distinct opportunity. “The Gulf is a unique place in that people from all over the world come together,” she says. Infectious disease research is therefore both more complicated and more important. Much of what we currently know about the immune system has been derived from studies of populations that don’t reflect the Gulf at all. The Gulf populations have their own genetics, environment, and way of life, which, in turn, shape how they respond to infection. 

“The research we do here can help us to understand how our genetic make-up, our environment, and our way of life influence our response to infection and can help us to develop vaccines and treatments that are appropriate for our own communities,” she says.

The massive investment that the Middle East has made in advanced healthcare makes the timing of Almushaikeh’s work very pertinent. “This is a very timely moment to be thinking about access to medical imaging and also about the safe delivery of that imaging,” she says. Scintillators that produce a strong imaging signal at lower X-ray dose would reduce the patient’s radiation exposure whilst still providing the image quality required for diagnosis. That’s, of course, of paramount importance for children and patients who will be scanned regularly.

Alhammadi sees her work in perfect alignment with one of the UAE’s most significant science initiatives to date (the Emirati Genome Program), which is essentially a project to map the genetic profile of the Emirati population in order to enable more personalized approaches to prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. “Genomics can tell us about the genetic predisposition of our population, our cell membrane models could be a platform to look at what’s happening functionally at the cellular level,” she explains. 

Disease-specific models could go on to help explain why certain therapies work differently for different people and take genomics data to the next level by providing solutions that are truly relevant to the UAE.

For Dr. Al Handawi, water security is one of the key scientific challenges in the region, not because it’s a problem that will crop up in the future, but because it’s a structural problem. The region is inherently arid. Desalination is a necessity, but it’s extremely energy-intensive. Billions of people around the world still don’t have access to safe drinking water. The UAE, in particular, is a high-humidity, foggy environment, so there is water in the atmosphere that is essentially being wasted. 

“That presents a very significant scientific opportunity, actually,” she says. “Can we develop ways of taking water from the air that are more sustainable and less energy-intensive? The challenge is not just to find new sources of water, it’s to find ways of doing it that are practical, that are scalable, and that are appropriate to the region.”

Dr. Al-Araimi’s work fits closely with Oman Vision 2040, which focuses on science, research, sustainability, and building a knowledge-based economy. Instead of seeing wastewater and industrial CO2 only as problems, she looks for ways to recover their value as resources. “What’s important to me is that this work is being done in Oman,” she says. “The ambition is not just to take a technology that’s been developed elsewhere and bring it in here, it’s to develop the knowledge, develop the technology, and build the expertise here in Oman.”

GOOD SCIENCE, HARD PROBLEMS

The biggest hurdle for Dr. Al-Araimi to overcome was not the external skepticism. It was her own doubt about whether something so integrated could work outside the lab. Proving that bacteria can degrade pollutants or that microalgae can consume CO2 is one thing. Getting those biological processes to work together in a single system in a stable and consistent manner is quite another. “I came to see that skepticism is actually quite useful rather than a negative,” she says. It drove her to ask the hard questions about stability, scalability, and whether the system could, in fact, be integrated into the existing wastewater treatment infrastructure. The next stage is a 10 to 20-liter pilot. “The way you get over skepticism in science is not by saying ‘it will work’ but by producing the evidence that shows where and how it can work.”

For Almushaikeh, the biggest challenge was getting the right balance between performance and practicality. A material can be absolutely superb in the lab and yet completely fail as a real-world imaging material, as it won’t be stable, scalable, or easy to process into a good screen. Much of her work focused on understanding how small changes in composition and structure would affect light emission under X-ray irradiation. “The hardest challenge, in my opinion, is to work out which materials would actually perform better in a real-world situation and why,” she says.

Dr. Alrubayyi is tackling the same basic problem from two sides. She studies why some people clear viral infections better than others and what makes their immune responses so strong. This knowledge can be used in two ways: “to design a vaccine that essentially primes the immune system prior to infection, or to develop immunotherapies that help the immune system to fight an infection that’s already established.” The fields are different, she says, but closely connected.

The translation gap is where Zedan sees the biggest bottleneck between the lab and the patient. You can easily demonstrate in the lab that a given antiviral will inhibit viral replication. The real issue, before it gets to the patient, is a whole raft of other questions: Is it safe? Does it reach the right part of the body? Does it work in a living system? Can it be made consistently at scale? For siRNA in particular, delivery is a major issue. “It’s not sufficient to have a treatment that works against the virus,” she says. 

“We have to make sure we can deliver it to the right place in the body and keep it there long enough to be effective.” That is why in her work the question isn’t simply ‘does it stop the virus?’ but ‘can we deliver it safely and effectively enough to make a difference?’

She had her breakthrough in the second year of her PhD, after a long period of trial and error. Building membrane models with material isolated from cells was much harder than using synthetic material. At one point, she wondered if she should just use more synthetic material to make the system work.

Dr. Al Handawi’s process is very much by design: observe the natural adaptation, understand the mechanism, reproduce it, and then engineer it into a practical technology. With Tamarix aphylla, the salts it exudes will deliquesce at around 50% RH, as opposed to the conventional salts such as sodium chloride, which require much higher humidity. That difference is interesting both from a biological point of view and as a material for water harvesting and potentially for cloud seeding. The next stage is to reproduce those salts in the lab and then test them across a range of engineered systems, from small, deployable fog/humidity-harvesting devices to cloud seeding. “The process is really to observe the natural adaptation, understand the mechanism, reproduce it, and then engineer it into a practical technology,” she says.

EUREKA. NOW WHAT?

The real test of scientific discovery is what comes after the discovery. Can the material actually become a useful imaging screen? Can the lab model explain why a drug works in one patient but not in another? Can the ability of a desert plant to suck up moisture be the seed of a new way of securing water? These questions will now drive the next phase of work for the scientists being recognized by L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science.

Almushaikeh developed her interest in applied work as she watched the research scene in Saudi Arabia develop over time. She started in Riyadh and saw the research ecosystem grow and mature. She ultimately came to the view that research should be applied to industry and the real world rather than be a stand-alone endeavor.

Alhammadi is looking to change the way we think about personalized medicine. Medicine can be highly individualized, as the doctor takes the patient’s history into account and modifies the treatment as appropriate. Most drugs, however, are still developed and prescribed on the basis of their effect in large groups of people, even though individuals with the same condition can respond very differently to the same drug.

“We are not all the same biologically,” she says. The long-term aim is to go beyond treating the patient as an average responder and to actually predict how an individual’s biology might respond. 

Zedan is also working in the same space of antiviral research, just attempting to keep up with the new respiratory viruses that are emerging. Her approach is to use siRNA (small interfering RNA), which is designed to suppress viral replication, delivered via lipid nanoparticles that will deliver it to the respiratory system through the nose. Rather than developing a completely new treatment for each virus, the idea is to develop a platform that can target multiple viruses.

“What makes an antiviral ‘next generation’ is the specificity of the way it works and the adaptability of the technology,” says Zedan. The combination of targeted therapy with a non-invasive delivery route could provide researchers with another tool in their arsenal as they look to prepare for future emerging infections. Whether it can live up to that potential will depend on further work on safety, efficacy, and real-world performance.

Water security is a very different issue, particularly in a region where desalination is still absolutely essential but so energy-intensive. Dr. Al Handawi is hopeful that atmospheric water harvesting, passive irrigation, and improved fog harvesting will one day supplement the existing water supply in a much more energy-efficient manner.

Her work is based on plants from the UAE and the wider region, which have evolved in their own ways to collect moisture. She would like to see more local research groups get involved in this area and use their findings to develop materials and devices that can then be tested in the real world. The goal is not simply to replicate one plant’s method but to develop a whole area of bioinspired water research appropriate to the region.

Dr. Al-Araimi is also looking at how scientific research can be applied to the way in which we manage our resources. Her integrated wastewater treatment system uses both bacteria and microalgae to remove pollutants, utilizes CO2, and produces biomass that could, in itself, be used further. The next step is to establish whether those processes can operate reliably outside the laboratory.

Her next step is a 10-20 liter pilot system to look at pollutant removal, CO2 utilization, biomass production, and general performance. If that works, then she’d like to look at how it could be integrated into an existing wastewater treatment plant.

The applications may differ, but the ambition is consistent: to move from understanding a problem to developing something that can help solve it. Whether the next step involves preparing for a future outbreak, making treatment decisions more individual, or finding new ways to manage water and waste, progress will depend on what these discoveries can demonstrate beyond the laboratory.

A WIDER ROLE FOR RECOGNITION

Dr. Al-Araimi hopes the recognition will help her take her environmental research beyond the laboratory. Her immediate goal is to develop a pilot system, build new collaborations, and advance research on the circular bioeconomy in Oman. The fellowship will also support and train a young female researcher, giving her a more direct role in developing scientific talent.

“We need more than encouragement for women to enter science; we need to create opportunities for them to stay, grow, and lead,” she says. Dr. Al-Araimi wants younger researchers to have the practical support they need to develop their skills and establish themselves. Seeing a scientist from their own region receive recognition, she believes, can also make an ambitious scientific career feel more attainable.

Dr. Al Handawi hopes the award will bring greater attention to bioinspired water research, encouraging universities and research groups across the region to investigate the potential of native plants and develop new collaborations. But the broader ambition is to help young women imagine themselves not only as students or researchers, but also as scientists, policy leaders, and people who influence the region’s scientific priorities.

Zedan similarly hopes the recognition will help her antiviral research reach a wider audience, opening opportunities for collaboration and training as she works to move it closer to real-world application. The problem she is tackling extends beyond the region, and she sees greater visibility as a way to amplify the work.

Almushaikeh also sees the award as an opportunity to bring her work on X-ray imaging materials to a wider audience and build collaborations that could extend its impact. She hopes that recognizing women scientists from the region will give younger women more examples of what a research career can look like and encourage them to pursue ambitious scientific questions of their own.

For Alhammadi, the immediate priority is to move her cell membrane research beyond proof of concept. She wants to develop it into a platform that researchers and, eventually, healthcare professionals could use to study disease, evaluate treatments, and support more personalized medicine. New collaborations could help her get there, but the award’s personal significance runs deeper.

“I would genuinely love for another woman to look at my journey one day and feel inspired to take an opportunity she might be afraid to take,” she says. Alhammadi hopes to do more than serve as an example. She wants to mentor and support other women, passing on the encouragement that helped her progress.

Dr. Alrubayyi sees the recognition as part of a wider story about scientific achievement in the Middle East. At a time when international coverage of the region often focuses on politics and conflict, she believes it is important to share stories that reflect its scientific talent and ambition.