Prof. Ahmed Rebai, PhD
Centre of Biotechnology of Sfax
Dr. Ahmed Rebai received his engineer degree in Statistical Genetics in 1991 from the
Institut National Agronomique de Paris-Grignon, France and his PhD from the same
university in 1995 on developing methods and computational tools for genetic mapping.
He then worked at the Institute National Agronomique de Toulouse (France) as a post-doc
researcher in Bioinformatics. He subsequently served as assistant professor of
Biostatistics at Institut National Agronomique de Tunisie (Tunisia) in 1998 and then as a
researcher in the Centre of Biotechnology of Sfax since 1999. In 2002 he obtained the
degree of ‘Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches’ (HDR) in Life Sciences from the
University of Paris 11, France.
Dr. Rebai has contributed greatly to the development of Bioinformatics teaching and
research in Tunisia and Africa where he leaded and contributed to several national and
international initiatives in these fields. He was invited professor at LeMans University
(France) in 2008/2010 and 2019 and invited lecturer at several international workshops
and Conferences and served as an expert evaluator for several universities around the
world. He is member of different national and international bodies: Chair of the Data and
Biospecimen Access Committee of the H3Africa consortium, expert evaluator the PRIMA
foundation (Spain) since 2019 and the AREF foundation (UK), since 2020 and consultant
for the Science for Africa Foundation (Kenya), since 2022.
Dr Rebai was director of the Laboratory of Molecular and Cellular Screening Processes at
the Centre of Biotechnology of Sfax (2009-2018). Since 2003 he has been leading a research group working on the development of computational methods, tools and
techniques for the analysis of genomics data and their applications to the diagnosis and
prognosis of complex diseases. In 2019 he was one of the founding PIs of “Genome-
Tunisia”, a ten-years strategic program, under the coordination of the Tunisian Ministry of
Health, that aims to develop large-scale Genomics research and pave the way for the
implementation of Precision Medicine.
Dr. Rebai published more than 250 journal articles, edited a book and three journal special
issues and filed four patents. His publication record depicts his wide collaboration network
and the diversity of his contributions in the field of computational biology and genetics. He
is associate editor and member of the Editorial board of six international peer-reviewed
journals.
In 2006, Dr Rebai founded the start-up DMIT that offered services to bio-industry and
pharmaceutical companies in data mining, analyses and process optimization. In 2023 he
became CTO of the start-up MyRNApp and consultant for the French start-up “In silico
analyses”, that both propose Bioinformatics and AI-based solutions for Biopharma
industries.
Dr Rebai was awarded the National Medal (4 th category) of The Tunisian Republic in
Science and Education in 2006.