Bader F. Al-Anzi

Research Scientist - Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research (KISR)

Biography

Bader F. Al-Anzi is a Research Scientist at the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research (KISR). Currently Dr. Al-Anzi is part of a collaborative effort involving biologists, mathematicians, and computer scientists from multiple international research institutes to define a protein network that regulates fat storage in yeast. The collaboration was very successful, and it led to the development of a new network model called the Stochastic Block Model with Path Selection (SBM-PS). This new model has much broader implications than any previously published computational model of biological networks, since it more faithfully captures most of the archetypal features observed in functionally and physically disparate biological networks. Creating the SBM-PS model was not a trivial task; It required the employment of the unique skills provided by each of my colleagues and a significant amount of computational power. Dr Al-Anzi was a Senior Research Fellow at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) from 2011-2016. He earned his Ph.D. in molecular and cellular biology from Yale University in 2004, where he worked on the developmental neurobiology of the fruit fly. Later, he did a postdoc at the Seymour Benzer's lab at Caltech, the originator and the most important figure in that field of behavioral genetics. Dr Al-Anzi initially worked on the responses of adult fruit flies to chemical irritants in wasabi, a Japanese horseradish food additive. The results of this work were published in a 2006 paper in the journal Current Biology. At the same time, he used newly developed experimental tools to define neurons responsible for the regulation of fat storage in flies, which led to numerous first author publications in top scientific journal.