MSc Student (graduated 2023/05)
Fatimah is an MSc student in the Sustainable & Synthetic Biotechnology Group at KAUST under the supervision of Professor Kyle Lauersen. Fatimah is from the Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia. She completed her undergraduate with honors with a BSc in Biomedical Engineering, in the area of rehabilitation and human factors engineering from Virginia Commonwealth University in the US. Prior to joining the SSB group, she had the opportunity to develop part of her experience in VibraLab at KAUST, where she applied different omics approaches to investigate cancer stem cells and understand the lipid formation of the cells using mass spectrometry, to eventually understand cancer progression and allow the finding for early cancer detection.
Fatimah’s interests include working with local conditions to create a large-scale production system that can work locally at a lower cost by being able to utilize wastewater and, ultimately, produce valuable biomass. Her thesis focuses on the co-cultivation of an isoprenoid-producing Cyanidioschyzon merolae strain with different Galdieria sulphuraria strains and, eventually, test the productivity of isoprene when combining the different algae genera. She also focuses on the cultivation of different local algae species from Saudi Arabia with different polymer electronics to evaluate the interaction between the alga culture and electronic devices, with the aim to eventually use and explore microalgae for various sustainable applications.
● M.Sc. Bioengineering, KAUST, 2021-2023
● B.Sc. Biomedical Engineering with a Minor in Mathematics, Virginia Commonwealth University 2016-2020
Sustainable & Synthetic Biotechnology Group
Biological and Environmental Science and Engineering