Zaleha Abdullah Mahdy

Biography

Zaleha graduated with a basic medical degree from UKM in 1989. Between 1992 and 1998, she trained and obtained membership of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) in London, Masters in Ob-Gyn (UKM), and a Doctorate in Medicine (Newcastle University, United Kingdom). Her Ob-Gyn special interest area is maternal fetal medicine, specifically in preeclampsia research. She is currently Professor and Senior Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist at UKM Medical Centre in Kuala Lumpur, having finished her three-year term as Dean of the UKM Faculty of Medicine in February 2019. Between February 2016 and November 2017, she was also the Director of UKM’s teaching hospital. Until November 2020, she was an appointed council member of the Malaysian Medical Council (MMC) for three terms. In 2018, she was appointed as a co-opted committee member of the Malaysian International Representative Committee (IRC) of the RCOG. She has been chairing the MedEx (Medical Specialist Pre-Entrance Examination) Steering Committee since 2018, and currently chairs the MMC Education Specialty Sub-Committee for Obstetrics and Gynaecology training. She has published 126 articles in journals, several books and chapters in books, and more than 150 abstracts and proceedings. She is Associate Editor in the Editorial Board of three international journals – Frontiers in Medicine, Frontiers in Surgery, and BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth. Presently she heads the Health Technology Innovation Lab in UKM (HTIL@UKM) and her current research interests include medical virtual reality (m-VR), 3D animation for medical and health education, medical drone development, and mobile app design for antenatal care. She is the Vice Chairperson of the Malaysian Society for Simulation in Healthcare (MaSSH), Immediate Past President of the Perinatal Society of Malaysia, a trainer in iCOE (Intensive Course in Obstetric Emergencies) under the Obstetrical and Gynaecological Society of Malaysia (OGSM), and a member of the Society for Simulation in Healthcare (SSH). She is an adjunct representative of the Global CoLab Pregnancy Network centred in the Magee Women’s Research Institute at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. She attained a Black Belt in Taekwondo in 2011 to keep up with her four kids, and in her spare time, cycles with her family at the Putrajaya Lakeside.