The article follows Qais's path from medicine to public health, including mentoring more than 50 graduate students, and his doctoral project on system readiness for digital innovation in Saudi Arabia.

"Qais exemplifies what we aim for in our DrPH students: strong analytical skills with a focus on real-world implementation."

Rick Siegrist

By Amy Roeder, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Photo: Kent Dayton

Read the Harvard article

The program

The Doctor of Public Health program at Harvard Chan asked me to move beyond analysis and toward implementation. My doctoral project looked at how ready health systems are to adopt digital tools for prediabetes prevention. I interviewed senior leaders across government, clinical care, academia, and industry, and used the NASSS framework to understand why promising innovations stall and what it takes for them to scale.

Leadership development

The program changed how I think about leadership. I came to see it less as a title and more as an inner orientation: listening carefully, staying curious, and translating between clinical, technical, policy, and business languages so that people from different disciplines can work toward a shared goal. I learned to stay confident in my capacity to lead while remaining humble enough to learn from a diverse team of experts, and to balance ambitious change with what a system can realistically absorb.

Moving forward

I plan to keep bridging research and real-world implementation, advancing diabetes, obesity, and NCD prevention and helping health systems adopt digital health tools that last beyond the pilot. I also want to keep mentoring the next generation of early-career researchers and innovators, as I have with more than 50 graduate students. Above all, I hope to keep staying open to unexpected doors.

In 2025 I returned to the Washington University in St. Louis campus, where I earned my MPH in biostatistics and epidemiology in 2021. This time I came back to celebrate my brother as he completed the LLM program at WashU's law school.

Walking the campus again was deeply nostalgic. The familiar paths and corridors brought back how much those years shaped my path in public health, and it felt meaningful to stand there again with years of work behind me.

Above all, I felt proud. Watching my brother finish his program and become a fellow WashU alumnus was a moment I will always treasure. It was a reminder that milestones are best when they are shared, and that WashU now holds a special place for both of us.

I finished my MPH at Washington University in St. Louis in 2021, but because of COVID-19 I never got to walk the stage. Three years later, in 2024, I finally did.

I took a week off from my DrPH program and flew from Boston to St. Louis with my parents. Of course, the trip had other plans at first. My flight was delayed, I got stuck in Atlanta for the day, and I spent the night sleeping on the airport floor. Not the most glamorous start, but I finally made it to St. Louis.

Walking the stage felt surreal. I could not have been happier to be back on campus. More than a ceremony, it was a farewell to a long chapter I had wanted to close for a long time.

In 2014 I presented one of my projects with Dr. Maha Almozaini at Alfaisal University's Fifth Annual Research Day, in the student poster competition for medicine and health science. Our poster, "The Role of SAMHD1 in HIV-2 (Vpx) Gene Expression and Its Relation to HIV-2 Pathogenesis," looked at how a protein in the body called SAMHD1 relates to a gene in HIV-2 called Vpx, in samples from patients.

I was honored to win first place. The work came from the Immunocompromised Host Research section at King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre, with collaborators at NYU School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School, and I am grateful to everyone who was part of it.

For four years I worked with Dr. Maha Almozaini, who founded and directs the Immunocompromised Host Research section in the Department of Infection and Immunity at King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre in Riyadh. She established the first HIV laboratory at the hospital, and she has been my mentor, my friend, and my role model.

Our work focused on the immunocompromised host, and we were the first lab in the Kingdom to work with HIV patients and other blood-borne pathogens. Together we worked on basic research, including the roles of the SAMHD1 and Vpx genes, as well as diagnostic tools, grant submissions, lab inventory, and epidemiological analysis. That work led to publications we wrote together, including a 2021 review in Infection and Drug Resistance on HIV co-infections in Saudi Arabia.

Dr. Almozaini taught me how to translate research from the bench to the bedside, and working with her helped me build my credibility as a scientist. I hold a lot of respect for her, and I owe her a great deal for helping me become the physician-scientist I am today.

While I was a medical student, I spent a summer doing research in Prof. Martin Pollak's lab at Harvard and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, a lab that studies kidney diseases. This photo is from my last day there.

It was an incredible experience. I worked with animal models, explored molecular testing, and got to live in the city of Boston, all in one summer.

Looking back now, almost 15 years later, that summer in 2012 was a dream that came true, and I am still grateful for every part of it.

Prof. Chaker Adra was my first mentor. He was the former chairman of the stem cell therapy program at King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre in Riyadh.

I first met him by chance. I was passing by his office at the research center, still in my scrubs after spending the day in the operating room with Prof. Imad Kanaan from Neurosurgery. Prof. Adra met me with enthusiasm, told me about a project he and Prof. Kanaan were working on together, and invited me to join his lab for summer training.

That invitation opened the door to so much that followed. It later led me to fly to Boston to train in Prof. Martin Pollak's lab at Harvard, and later to work with Dr. Maha Almozaini at King Faisal Specialist Hospital.

I have long respected Prof. Adra, and I owe much of my success to his trust in my skills and his belief in my capacity as a scientist. He is both a mentor and a friend, and I am deeply grateful to him.

While I was a medical student at Alfaisal University, I gave a talk at TEDxAlfaisalU titled "Utopia and the Barriers to Social Development." The talk was later published on the TEDx Talks YouTube channel.

Watch the talk on YouTube