Amid the latest Cabinet reshuffle, Iman Al-Mutairi was appointed assistant commerce minister on Thursday.
Throughout her career, Al-Mutairi has held a number of academic posts at several universities around the world.
She was a scientific research consultant at PerkinElmer in the US from 2000 to 2003 and assistant professor in human genetics at Harvard University from 1998 to 2000.
Before that, Al-Mutairi was teaching assistant at the University of Bristol in the UK from 1994 to 1997 and at King Faisal University the year before that.
Al-Mutairi also held several posts at Saudi Aramco over the space of more than a decade.
She was preventive medicine adviser at an Aramco hospital from 2003 to 2007, chief of quality control between 2009 and 2011 and workforce administrator the year after that.
She was manager of the Johns Hopkins-Saudi Aramco Health Care joint venture from 2013 to 2014 and a member of the board of trustees at the Royal University for Women in Bahrain in 2013.
Al-Mutairi is currently the head of the human capability development program office in the Kingdom, a Vision 2030 flagship program to reform the education and training system. She also leads the
National Competitiveness Center, which was created by Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority.
Al-Mutairi earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from King Faisal University in 1992 and a Ph.D. in bio-organic chemistry from the University of Bristol in 1997. She completed a post-doctoral fellowship in genetics and molecular biology at Harvard University in 2000.
