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 Applied Statistsics. 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 Biostatistics and 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 in Biostatistics at LeMans University (France) in 2008/2010 and 2019 and invited lecturer at several international workshops in Bioinformatics/Biostatistics in Africa and Europe and served as an expert evaluator for several universities around the world. He is an expert member/evaluator/consultant in different national and international bodies (Data and Biospecimen Access Committee of the H3Africa (since 2016); The PRIMA program (since 2019), Scientific adviser for the H2020 program (2020), College of experts of AREF/UK, (since 2020); Consultant for the BMGF (since 2022)).
Dr Rebai was director of the Laboratory of Molecular and Cellular Screening Processes at the Centre of Biotechnology of Sfax (2009-2019). Since 2003 he has been leading a research group working on the development of computational methods, tools and techniques for the analysis of genomics and biomedical data and their applications to the diagnosis and prognosis of complex diseases.
Dr. Rebai published more than 250 journal articles, edited one book 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 also member of the Editorial board of six international peer-reviewed journals. According to Scopus, Dr Rebai has over 4750 citations in scientific publications and a H-index of 39.
In 2006, Dr Rebai founded the start-up DMIT that offer services to bio-industry and pharmaceutical companies in data mining, analyses and process optimization. He is currently Chief Technical officer of two start-up offering services in genomics data analyses and bioinformatics.
Dr Rebai was awarded the National Medal (4th category) of The Tunisian Republic in Science and Education in 2006.