Rate My Professor Youssef Idaghdour

Youssef Idaghdour is an Associate Professor of Biology in the Division of Science at New York University Abu Dhabi and a Global Network Associate Professor of Biology in the Faculty of Arts and Science at New York University. He serves as Director of the Public Health Research Center and Principal Investigator of the Idaghdour Lab on Environmental Genomics at NYU Abu Dhabi. Born and raised in southern Morocco, Idaghdour began his career working on conservation genetics of endangered avian species after earning his BSc in Biology from Ibn Zohr University in Agadir. He then pursued an MSc in Molecular Genetics at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom and a PhD in Genetics at North Carolina State University in the United States under a Fulbright Scholarship, focusing on evolutionary quantitative genetics and gene-environment interactions. Following his doctorate, he held a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Sainte-Justine Research Center in Montreal, Canada, contributing to the 1000 Genomes Project and advancing studies in population and medical genomics.

Idaghdour's research examines the interplay of genetic and environmental factors in health-related phenotypes, disease susceptibility, and outcomes across biological scales from genome architecture to epigenetic regulation and protein function. His lab generates high-dimensional genomic data from single cells, tissues, and populations to investigate metabolic traits, immune responses to cancer and infections including malaria and COVID-19, host-pathogen interactions, and gene-environment effects. He also develops genetic tools for ecological genomics and population studies of endangered wildlife and marine species such as Houbara bustards and falcons. Key publications include 'Recombination affects accumulation of damaging and disease-associated mutations in human populations' in Nature Genetics (2015), 'High-resolution genomic analysis of human mitochondrial RNA sequence variation' in Science (2014), 'Integrative genomic analysis reveals mechanisms of immune evasion in P. falciparum malaria' in Nature Communications (2020), and 'Metabolome modulation of the host adaptive immunity in human malaria' in Nature Metabolism (2021). Idaghdour has received the Fulbright Scholarship, Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship, and a 2021 Chan Zuckerberg Initiative grant of approximately USD 2.7 million to build an African Ancestry Immune Cell Atlas promoting global representation in single-cell genomics.