Professor Datuk Dr. A Rahman A Jamal is a professor of paediatric haematology, oncology and molecular biology at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. He graduated from the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia and has a PhD from the University of London. He was the founding director and now the senior principal research fellow of the UKM Medical Molecular Biology Institute (UMBI), and an honorary professor at the University of Dundee, Scotland, UK.
He is the project leader for The Malaysian Cohort and the Cohort Biobank, with data and biospecimens from 120000 participants. His research interests include cancers, other non-communicable diseases, stem cells, population cohort study, and recently molecular epidemiology of Covid-19. He has 239 indexed publications, H-index of 32 and more than 3400 citations. He was listed amongst the top 2% scientists in the world by Elsevier in 2022. He has supervised 24 PhD and 64 MSc students. He leads the genome research team in UMBI and the team has performed whole genome sequencing on cancers, other non-communicable diseases and Covid-19. One of his latest projects is to investigate host factors that determines the severity, outcome and long-term complications of Covid-19 infection.
He has also recently obtained a grant from Yayasan Petronas for a precision medicine initiative in paediatric cancers which will involve whole genome sequencing and the detection of minimal residual disease. He is involved in two MRC UK-Malaysia research projects on diabetes and obesity, in collaboration with researchers from Oxford and Dundee respectively. He is also embarking on a large-scale microbiome study using the shotgun metagenomic sequencing approach. He is the chairman of National Stem Cell Committee for Ethics in Research and Therapy, Ministry of Health (MOH) and member of the National Clinical Trials Committee MOH. He is a fellow of the Academy Sciences of Malaysia and heads a task force for the Precision Medicine Initiative. He is currently a board member for the Clinical Research Malaysia Sdn Bhd, Melaka Biotechnology Corporation and NanoMalaysia Berhad. He is a member of the Wellcome Trust UK Funding Committee for Longitudinal Population Studies and the International Health-100K+ Cohort Consortium (IHCC). He has given more than 190 invited lectures at various conferences, seminars and workshops.
SeDia Cohort is established, maintained and governed as a collaborative public-private partnership between the Ministry of Health (MOH), Malaysia and the International Medical University (IMU), Kuala Lumpur. The MOH will be represented by Negeri Sembilan Health Department and Seremban District Health Office.
