
The Department of Systems Biology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center is pleased to welcome new faculty member, Mohammed AlQuraishi , PhD, effective Sept. 21. Dr. AlQuraishi joins Columbia as an assistant professor and as a member of Columbia’s Program for Mathematical Genomics.
Prior to joining Columbia, Dr. AlQuraishi served as a fellow of systems pharmacology and systems biology at Harvard Medical School. He completed his PhD in genetics and master’s in statistics from Stanford University. At Santa Clara University, he earned two bachelor’s degrees in biology and in computer engineering.
A Bay Area transplant via Baghdad and Kuala Lumpur, Dr. AlQuraishi spent most of his teenage years in the San Francisco Bay Area before moving to the east coast for postdoctoral work. Influenced by the dot-com boom of the early 2000s in the Bay Area, Dr. AlQuraishi founded two startups in the mobile computing space before focusing on a career in academia. His circuitous path to systems biology and academic research ultimately blended his genuine interest and expertise in computer programming, mathematics, molecular biology, and science more broadly.
“What drew me to biology is its similarity to software, the fact that cells are always executing a sort of program," he says. "And just like programs, cells are more than a parts list—they are complex and interconnected in myriad ways. To tame this complexity we need synthesis, and that is the promise and challenge of systems biology.”