Speaker: Joel A. Malek

Associate Professor of Genetic Medicine

Director, Genomics Core Laboratory, Weill Cornell Medicine (Qatar)

– Hosted by Professor Ikram Blilou

Join us in auditorium 0215 between building 4 and 5.

Abstract

The date palm is of high importance to countries across North Africa, the Middle East, and parts of South Asia. Over the past decade, our group and others have established genomic resources for the date palm and shown a significant amount of population structure related to regions of date palm cultivation. At the same time, we have collected diverse date fruit samples to provide a resource allowing a better understanding of underlying genetic diversity and phenotypes of interest. The resource contains nearly 200 sequenced date palm cultivars along with metabolomic and image date on 120 of the samples. During this seminar, I will present our work to map the genotype-phenotype relationship for sex determination, fruit sugar content, and dry date fruit color.

About the speaker

Joel A. Malek is Associate Professor of Genetic Medicine and Director of the Genomics Core Laboratory at Weill Cornell Medicine (Qatar). He received his BSc in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics from the University of California Los Angeles (US), his MSc in Biotechnology from Johns Hopkins University (US), and his PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology from the University Paris-Sud 11 (France). Prior to joining WCM-Q, he held positions at the Institute for Genomic Research, Agencourt Bioscience, and Applied Biosystems. Malek was involved in the Human Genome Project and the development of Next Generation DNA sequencing technologies. His research focuses on the development, application, and data analysis of genomic technologies.