Fowzan S. Alkuraya, professor of human genetics at Saudi Arabia's Alfaisal University

The American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) has named Fowzan S. Alkuraya M.D. as the 2020 recipient of the Curt Stern Award.
The award, which includes a plaque and a $10,000 award, is named after the late pioneering geneticist Curt Stern.
Alkuraya is a professor of human genetics at Alfaisal University and a senior consultant and principal clinical scientist at King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center, Riyadh.
He did his MBBS at King Saud University. He completed his pediatric residency at Georgetown University Hospital, followed by fellowships in clinical and molecular genetics at Harvard Medical School.
His postdoctoral research focused on developmental genetics in the lab of Richard Maas at Harvard Medical School.
Alkuraya is an authority in the area of Mendelian genetics, with more than 420 published manuscripts that describe his lab’s discovery of hundreds of novel disease genes in humans.
Through his work on the “autozygome,” he recognized that the special population structure of Saudi Arabia made it possible to use regions of homozygosity to arrive at an accurate map of the morbid human genome for the benefit of mankind.
“Dr. Fowzan S. Alkuraya is an exemplary physician scientist who has taken his clinical observations into basic research in the laboratory,” said ASHG president Anthony Wynshaw-Boris.