P.D. Soros Fellowship for New Americans

Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, to engineers of Palestinian and Jordanian descent, Omar grew up with strong commitments to science, engineering, and Islam. In high school he won a regional Intel Science and Engineering Fair and 4th place at the international level.

Omar is an Investigator at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and member of the faculty at Harvard Medical School where he directs a lab developing next-generation gene editing, gene delivery, and synthetic biology technologies and applies them towards new therapeutics and the study of aging. He previously was a McGovern Fellow at MIT where he directed his own research group and before that was at Harvard Medical School and MIT as a graduate student in Feng Zhang’s lab at the Broad Institute, where he earned a Ph.D. researching novel CRISPR enzymes for genome editing, therapeutics, and diagnostics.

He is a pioneer in the gene editing space as an inventor on dozens of patents and patent applications relating to gene editing and diagnostic innovations, as well as over 30,000 citations on more than 40 peer-reviewed articles in journals like Nature, Science, and Cell. He is also co-founder of Sherlock Biosciences, Proof Diagnostics (acquired), and Tome Biosciences, which are commercializing CRISPR-based diagnostics for healthcare and at-home testing, as well as other stealth starts ups in the gene and RNA therapy space, which have collectively raised hundreds of millions. Dr. Abudayyeh has been recognized as Technology Review Innovators Under 35, Bloomberg New Economy Catalyst, Endpoints 20 under 40 Next Generation of Biotech Leaders, 2022 Termeer Scholar, 2018 Forbes 30 under 30, Business Insider 30 under 30, a 2018 TEDMED Hive honoree, and a 2013 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow.

Dr. Abudayyeh graduated from MIT in 2012 with a B.S. in mechanical engineering and biological engineering, where he was a Henry Ford II Scholar and a Barry M. Goldwater Scholar. He also spent two years studying towards an MD at Harvard Medical School.