Meet our Advisory Team
The NoorDx advisory team consists of individuals with extensive expertise in the field of translational biomedical research, clinical genetics and life science venture creation. The advisors work closely with the leadership team to guide overall strategic planning and operations of the company.
Pierre Magistretti, MD, PhD
Co-Founder and Advisor
Arnab Pain, PhD
Scientific Advisor
Jason Schrum, PhD
Co-Founder and Advisor
Pierre Magistretti, MD, PhD
Co-Founder and Advisor
Currently serving as Director of the Smart Health Initiative at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Pierre has enjoyed an extraordinary scientific career across 50-plus years.
A Swiss and Italian citizen, one of the proudest accolades he has received is being elected as a Foreign Member of Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, the highest Italian academic honor at an institution founded 1603.
Pierre became a Doctor of Philosophy in 1982, obtaining his PhD from the University of California. Since then, a large part of his career has been centered around the University of Lausanne Medical School in Switzerland, where he held several positions between 1988 and 2017. In 2004, he became a Founding Director at the Center for Psychiatric Neuroscience at the Department of Psychiatry in the university’s medical school. Between 2005 and 2017, Pierre was also a Professor at the Brain Mind Institute, part of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
Pierre’s career at KAUST began in 2012, where he served as a Distinguished Professor and Dean until 2020.
Arnab Pain, PhD
Scientific Advisor
Arnab is a distinguished academic in the field of genomics which spans more than 30 years.
In the early 1990s, he obtained an MSc in Mycology and Plant Pathology from the Indian Agricultural Research Institute before moving to the University of Cambridge where he became a Doctor of Philosophy in 1996. After this, he became a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford and spent almost the whole of the 2000s as a Senior Scientist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge.
Since 2010, Arnab has been an influential figure at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, serving as an Associate Professor in the institution’s division of Biological and Environmental Science and Engineering.
Here, his research group uses high-throughput sequencing and comparative genomics to study pathogen genomes and genomic epidemiology, host-pathogen interactions and co-regulation of gene expression in the pathogen and the host.
Arnab also holds an honorary position as a Distinguished Professor at the Global Center for Zoonosis Control, which is based at Hokkaido University in Japan.
Sami Al-Qarawi, MD, PhD
Co-Founder and Advisor
Sami’s career in genetics dates back well over 25 years. After completing his masters and PhD in human genetics at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, he spent six years a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the same institution between 1995 and 2001.
For the next seven years, Sami held several important positions in the medical genetics and pathology and laboratory medicine departments at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Today, he serves as Manager of In - Kingdom Collaborations at the Biological and Environmental Science and Engineering department of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), a position he has held since 2015. Prior to this, Sami held the position of Director of Bioscience at KAUST’s Core Lab.
Sami’s higher education began with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and biology from the University of Washington in the United States. Since then, he has gone on to contribute several dozen peer-reviewed publications.
Jason Schrum, PhD
Co-Founder and Advisor
Jason brings more than a decade of life science experience to the table having worked across several large pharma, biotech, healthcare strategy, startup and academic roles.
He is currently the Managing Director of his own life science consulting business, Schrum & Associates, a venture founded in 2017 which focuses on helping businesses with new product strategy in established and emerging markets.
Jason completed his PhD at Harvard Medical School in Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology in 2010. He obtained this after completing a degree in Cellular and Molecular Biology from the University of Michigan in 2004.
During his career, Jason has been published in many top scientific publications and has successfully filed numerous US patents in drug design, chemistry and clinical applications.
His connection to Saudi Arabia was established in 2014 when he took an external advisory role at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Here, he helped to raise crucial funding and established partnerships with top-tier genomics institutes and health tech organizations in the US.