CURRENT STUDENTS
STUDENT RESOURCES
CURRENT STUDENTS FAQs
For M.S. students, your advisor when you are admitted to KAUST is the Program Chair. For Ph.D. students, your advisor is your PI (supervisor) whose lab you have been accepted in to.
Yes, you can change your advisor. M.S. students are advised to do so if/when they begin their thesis or directed research. Ph.D. students do have the ability to change advisors, but the overall impact to the Ph.D. project, as well as the time left to finish the Ph.D., could be significant. This will have to be taken into account before approval.
M.S. students need 36 credits (combination of courses and research is specific to your program).
Ph.D. students need 6 credits of 300-level coursework and will earn dissertation research credit each semester until they defend (no minimum credits established, although there is a minimum residency requirement of 2.5 years).
M.S. students get all university holidays (Eid Al-Fitr, Eid Al-Adha, Spring break).
Ph.D. students get university holidays and three weeks of annual/vacation leave per calendar year to be taken in agreement with your PI.
Yes. Drop and Add deadlines are on the academic calendar.
Your GPC can help you request these from the Registrar’s Office, or you can contact them directly at RegistrarHelpDesk@KAUST.EDU.SA
Latest Events
Abstract:
Brain organoids are miniaturized 3D avatars of the human brain derived from human pluripotent stem cells. They emerged as invaluable tools for investigating early human neuronal development, modeling neurological disorders, and for drug-screening applications. Veronica's presentation will delve into the principles of brain organoid generation, exploring the advantages and challenges associated with their use as cellular platforms for studying complex neurological syndromes. Furthermore, Veronica will highlight the research conducted in the Adamo laboratory, specifically focusing on modeling sex chromosome aneuploidies during early neurodevelopment. A comprehensive analysis integrating morphological, transcriptomic, and functional assessments demonstrated that supernumerary sex chromosomes detrimentally affect neural patterning, cortical architecture, and electrophysiological properties of brain organoids in a sex chromosome dose-dependent fashion.
Bio:
Dr. Astro is a senior research scientist in Professor Adamo's laboratory at KAUST. She earned her Ph.D. in Molecular Medicine from San Raffaele University in Italy. Throughout her research career, she served as a visiting scientist at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore. She received an EMBO postdoctoral fellowship to conduct research in Professor Zerial's lab at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany. Recently, Veronica was trained in utilizing brain organoids to model neurological diseases in Professor Muotri's lab at the University of California, San Diego. She is currently leveraging her expertise to investigate the neurodevelopmental implications of human sex chromosomal aneuploidies through iPSC-based disease models.
LIFE AT KAUST