By Rose Gregorio
Ghofran Othoum successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation on February 5, 2018. Her project, "Genome-Scale Evaluation of the Biotechnological Potential of Red Sea Bacilli Strains" was well received by committee members Professor Vladimir Bajic (KAUST), Distinguished Professor Takashi Gojobori (KAUST), Associate Professor Mani Sarathy (KAUST) and Professor Alan Christoffels (South African National Bioinformatics Institute).
Ghofran enrolled at KAUST as a Master's student in 2011 and continued on as a Ph.D. student under the supervision of Professor Vladimir Bajic. During her time at KAUST she has co-authored two papers, "DESM: Portal for Microbial Knowledge Exploration Systems" and "Complete Genome Sequence of Mycobacterium fortuitum subsp. fortuitum Type Strain DSM46621".
Ghofran shares that she has always been interested in using evolutionary studies and in silico simulations to understand the behavior of different microorganisms and finding medical applications for them. After graduating she hopes to pursue further research in a related field to answer other intriguing questions.
CBRC would like to congratulate Ghofran on a well done job.
