Puthen Veettil Jithesh, FRSB
Dr. Puthen Veettil Jithesh, FRSB is an associate professor at the College of Health and Life Sciences (CHLS) at Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU). He is currently the acting program coordinator of the Genomics & Precision Medicine (GPM) MS/PhD programs and chair of the GPM graduate admissions committee.
Dr. Jithesh holds a Master’s degree in microbiology, an Advanced Diploma in bioinformatics, and received his PhD in bioinformatics from Queen’s University Belfast, UK. He has over 20 years of research and development experience in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at several prestigious institutes in India, Qatar, and Russell Group universities in the United Kingdom.
Dr. Jithesh’s research focuses on bioinformatics and computational biology tool development and applications in translational research, genomics for the prediction of response and toxicity to drugs, identification of causal variants in rare genetic diseases, and machine learning and data science toward the implementation of precision health. He leads the pharmacogenomics stream of the Qatar Genome Program Research Consortium and recently published the actionable pharmacogenomic landscape of the Qatari population, which gained wide publicity nationally and internationally.
Before moving to Qatar, he was the Head of Bioinformatics for the Oxford Translational Molecular Diagnostic Centre at the University of Oxford.