Amal Alhelal

About

Amal Alhelal completed her MSc in Bioengineering at KAUST in 2024 under the supervision of Robert Hoehndorf. She was a student in the Bioinformatics and Machine Learning track of the Bioengineering programme, based at the Computational Bioscience Research Center (CBRC), and defended her thesis in May 2024.

Her thesis, titled Protein functional domain identification methodology (defended under the working title Exploring the association between protein functional domains and pathogenicity information derived from AI tools), investigated computational approaches to delineate functional domains within proteins and to relate them to the pathogenicity of genetic variants. The work combined AI-predicted variant-pathogenicity scores with sequence-level analyses to study how variant deleteriousness is distributed across identified protein domains, and extended this analysis to regions of proteins for which no functional domain has yet been characterised.

Her research sits at the intersection of protein function prediction, variant prioritisation, and bioengineering, and contributes to the group's broader effort to use AI-based pathogenicity tools to interpret coding variation in the context of protein structure and function. Her thesis committee included Robert Hoehndorf, Senay Kafkas, and Ricardo Henao Giraldo.