Researcher profile

Mohammed Bellaoui

Dr. Mohammed Bellaoui received his Bachelor of Science in Molecular Biology and Genetics and his Master of Science in Genetics and Physiology of Microorganisms from the Université of Paris-Sud, France. He then received his Ph.D. in september 1997 from the Université of Paris-Sud, France where he studied the regulation of mitochondrial gene expression in canola. From November 1997 to October 1998, Dr. Bellaoui held a postdoctoral position at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada where he discovered that the Arabidopsis BELL1 and KNOX TALE homeodomain proteins interact through a domain conserved between plants and animals. From November 98 to July 2000, He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California Berkeley in United States where he studied the regulation of chloroplast gene expression in spinach. From August 2000 to December 2001, Dr. Bellaoui was a research associate at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland where he studied the retrograde communication between the chloroplast and the nucleus in Tomato. His work shed new light on the importance of plastid function during embryogenesis and showed how the chloroplast can regulate nuclear gene activity through retrograde signaling. From 2002 to 2005, Dr. Bellaoui was a research associate at the University of Toronto in Canada where he studied cell cycle checkpoint pathways in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and discovered genes with the properties of a caretaker tumour suppressors. In 2005, Dr. Bellaoui joined the faculty of the University Mohammed Premier Oujda in Morocco. The aim of his research was to identify new compounds of therapeutic interest using different model organisms. Dr. Bellaoui identified an antiproliferative DNA damaging agent that may be useful as an anti-cancer drug. He also identified new antifungal agents that might represent promising lead compounds for further development of antifungal drugs for human therapy. Since 2011, Dr. Bellaoui's research interests have been in the fields of medical genetics and cancer. Dr. Bellaoui is co-founder and the head of the Genetics Unit at the Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacy of Oujda. He helped create the first medical genetics diagnostic laboratory as well as the first biobank in Eastern Morocco (BRO Biobank). Dr. Bellaoui founded the Ethics Committee for Biomedical Research of Oujda (CERBO) in 2015. Dr. Bellaoui received several awards and fellowships such as the prestigious Human Frontiers Science Program Organization Fellowship, Fulbright Scholar Program Fellowship, Arab-American Frontiers Fellowship, and Erasmus Mundus Fellowship.