MIT Jameel Clinic fellow Shrooq Alsenan appointed assistant professor at Princess Nourah University

Community Jameel congratulates Shrooq Alsenan on her appointment as an assistant professor at Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University (PNU) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. At PNU, the biggest female university in the world, Shrooq will continue her groundbreaking research on the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to improve healthcare outcomes for patients, in Saudi Arabia and around the globe.

Earlier this year, Shrooq concluded a fellowship at the MIT Jameel Clinic, the epicentre of AI and healthcare at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). As an MIT Jameel Clinic fellow – and the first from Saudi Arabia – Shrooq worked closely with Professor Regina Barzilay, faculty lead for AI at the MIT Jameel Clinic, and other collaborators to advance her research efforts.

In December 2022, as an MIT Jameel Clinic fellow, Shrooq was a speaker at the AI Cures • MENASA conference convened by the MIT Jameel Clinic, Community Jameel, Wellcome, the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence and the office of the United Arab Emirates minister of state for AI, digital economy and remote workplace applications. That conference kick-started an effort to bring partners in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia region into the Jameel Clinic AI hospital network, a platform established in 2021, with support from Wellcome, for the MIT Jameel Clinic to deploy AI tools – like the Mirai tool for predicting breast cancer – to hospitals around the world, and to collaborate with technicians and medical practitioners at network hospitals to refine the tools' effectiveness.

Shrooq also spoke at the 2022 MIT-MGB AI Cures conference and, most recently, at the first global initiative on AI for health (GI-AI4H), organised in Geneva by three United Nations agencies: the World Health Organisation, the World Intellectual Property Organisation and the International Telecommunication Union.

Before her fellowship at the MIT Jameel Clinic, Shrooq studied in Riyadh, completing her doctorate in information systems sciences at King Saud University and her undergraduate degree in information technology and computing at the Arab Open University.