Biomedical Sciences Division (BioMed)
Decoding Life, Advancing Health
Decoding Life, Advancing Health
The Biomedical Sciences (BioMed) division at KAUST brings together world-class science, technology, and education to address today’s most pressing health challenges. Through interdisciplinary research, advanced computational and digital tools, and strong partnerships across the healthcare ecosystem, BioMed connects discovery with real-world impact - supporting national priorities while contributing to global advances in health and disease.
BioMed will improve health in Saudi Arabia and beyond by harnessing cutting edge science and technology to investigate, educate on, and translate discoveries that make people’s lives better.
BioMed applies the scientific and technical expertise of KAUST by interdisciplinary collaboration and intersectional partnerships both within and beyond the university, leveraging and boosting the efforts of the health care ecosystem to understand, prevent, and treat disease.
We will encourage, educate, and promote expertise in the study and taming of disease to help engineer a healthier life for all, using knowledge generation with widespread deployment of health-translated advances underpinned by our cutting edge, world class technical expertise.
BioMed is KAUST's newest division, harnessing the University's world-class science and technology to advance healthcare outcomes in Saudi Arabia and beyond. We apply cutting-edge computational and digital tools to understanding, combating and preventing disease.
BioMed is at the start of an exciting journey. The division offers a collaborative environment where scientific excellence meets a passion for teaching and mentoring a new generation of graduates who will advance health in the 21st century.
Our priorities are those of the Kingdom, our mission aligned with Vision 2030's aspirations for better health. Our graduate programs uniquely integrate biology with engineering and bioinformatics and, our faculty and students strive to be future-ready for the rapidly emerging challenges and opportunities in biomedical science.
BioMed draws on the KAUST ecosystem of outstanding research and technical capabilities, all set against the backdrop of the Red Sea. We are beginning an ambitious journey, and invite those who share our vision of a healthier life for all.
Professor, Bioscience
We use a combination of high-throughput nucleic acid sequencing, coupled with functional genomics and bioinformatics tools, to enhance our understanding of the infectious agents and the pathogenic processes, leading to the development of potentially new intervention strategies.
Professor Arnab Pain’s research focuses on the uses of a combination of high-throughput sequencing, comparative and functional genomics, and bioinformatic tools to study natural population diversity and pathogenicity determinants in parasitic protists, bacteria, and fungi, and, more recently, viruses that are of major relevance to human and animal health. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, U.K., and postdoctoral training at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine in Oxford, U.K. Before joining KAUST in 2010, he was based at Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, U.K., where he focused on several comparative genomics projects of major parasitic and fungal pathogens of humans and animals. Professor Pain is active in numerous professional organizations. Since 2015, he has been appointed as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the International Institute for Zoonosis Control and the Institute for Vaccine Research and Development at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan. He also held a Visiting Professor of Genomics position (2018-20) at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Laboratory Sciences at the University of Oxford and an Honorary Professorship (2021-24) in the Department of Tropical Disease Biology at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) in the U.K. He has co-authored over 200 publications and six IP disclosures. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Biology (FRSB).
Professor Pain's group uses a combination of the latest DNA and RNA sequencing, and other omics-based methods coupled with functional genomics, cell biology, and bioinformatics tools to undertake research in the following priority areas:
Comparative genomics and adaptive evolution in Malaria and other Apicomplexan parasites relevant to human and animal health.
Pandemic preparedness for early detection and integrated monitoring of emerging and re-emerging pathogens in environmental and clinical samples by metagenomics and metatranscriptomics.
Genomic epidemiology and surveillance of major infectious agents such as coronaviruses, dengue and hospital-acquired infections in Saudi Arabia and the neighboring countries.
Next-generation sequencing-guided diagnosis of pathogens and microbiomes in human health and disease.
Many of the above studies are conducted in active partnership with several national and international partner organizations.
Post-doctoral fellow, Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine (WIMM), University of Oxford, UK, 2001
Ph.D., University of Cambridge, UK, 1996