Elias Dahdouh

Biography

I completed my Bachelor’s Degree in Biology (summa cum laude) at the Notre Dame University, Lebanon and started working in 2008 as a Research and Lab Assistant at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Balamand, Lebanon. I also participated in the management of five research labs, teaching gross human anatomy for medical students, and teaching lab techniques for Masters students. In parallel, I enrolled in a Biomedical Sciences Master’s program with a concentration in Clinical Microbiology, and obtained this degree in 2013 (cum laude).

In 2013, I enrolled in a PhD program in Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, and Biomedicine at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. My project was the phenotypic and genotypic determination of antibiotic resistance, virulence, and clonality of A. baumannii clinical isolates. I also detected a novel mutation that leads to colistin resistance, and demonstrated a link between biofilms and carbapenem resistance.

After being awarded the PhD (summa cum laude) in 2016, I went to Lebanon where I worked as a Consultant and Director of Academics at the Lebanese American Medical Association. During this time, I designed, developed, and implemented review courses for medical students wanting to take the USMLE Step 1 and Step 2 CK exams, and provided them with individualized counseling.

In 2018, I was awarded the Marie Skłodowska-Curie post-doctoral fellowship and started it at the Hospital Universitario La Paz, Madrid, Spain. My main project was tracking the relative intestinal loads of antibiotic resistance genes over time, and in relation to clinical interventions and outcomes among pediatric transplant patients. I was also involved as a contributor in 4 other research projects. Moreover, I was awarded a European grant under the JPI-AMR Network Plus 2020 call. As principal investigator of this project, I am coordinating a network that includes 12 research groups that span across 7 different countries with the aim of developing a strategy for the discovery of carbapenemase inhibitors.

In 2020, I was awarded the Juan de la Cierva – Incorporation grant at the same hospital in order to further develop the research line of my previous fellowship. In June of 2023, I started working at the Spanish National Center for Microbiology in the reference laboratory for antibiotic resistance.

My goal for the following years is to establish a research line to study the molecular evolution of antibiotic resistance as the patients are receiving treatment. I plan on focusing on less-researched mechanisms such as the quantification of the expression of efflux pumps and porins, quantifying the plasmid copy numbers, tracking mutations in the whole genome, and determining the extent of intestinal colonization by resistant organisms in the gut microbiome. Ultimately, I aim to identify biomarkers that can personalize the patients' treatments and improve their clinical outcome.

The skills I acquired over the years span across several fields that include classic microbiology techniques such bacterial identification, antibiotic susceptibility testing, growth curves, and competition assays. They also include molecular microbiology techniques such as primer and quantitative PCR design, Sanger sequencing, clonality analyses, and next-generation sequencing (whole-genome sequencing, metagenomic sequencing, targeted sequencing, and 16S microbiome studies using Illumina, Ion Torrent, and MinION). Moreover, I gained skills in biostatistics, analyses of data from different sources, data, lab, and course management, teaching, animal surgery, human anatomy, physiology, histology, biochemistry, and immunology.

To date, my career resulted in 40 publications (16 as first author, 10 as corresponding and 14 in Q1 journals), with 4 additional publications at different stages of the publication process. I have an H-Index of 14 with over 900 citations, and participated in 23 national and international conferences, including the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID; Europe), Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC; USA), and Sociedad Española de Enfermedades Infeciosas y Microbiología Clínica (SEIMC; Spain). I am the Principal Investigator in 3 projects (total funding=342,900€), collaborator in 4 projects (total funding=2,208,810€), have received various honors (such as best international project, best oral communication and obtaining my degrees with honors and distinction), and am on the editorial board of 3 prominent journals. I have also been a jury member on 2 PhD and 2 Masters theses defenses,directed 3 Masters projects, participated in the direction of 7 Senior projects, and taught over 300 students through classes, private teaching, and private tutoring.