Amin Mohamed

Research Associate Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: PhD (Marine Science) James Cook University (JCU) and Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), Australia


Amin Mohamed is generally interested in genomics research, where he utilizes different next-gen sequencing (NGS) applications to understand biological systems at different molecular levels. In his MSc study, Mohamed looked at coral diseases in the northern Red Sea of Egypt, the home for some "super" corals with remarkable biology, including climate change resilience. In 2012, he joined the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (coral genomics group) at James Cook University (JCU) in Townsville, Australia, to work on coral genomics for his PhD. His work at JCU was anchored on understanding host-symbiont interactions during the establishment of coral-algal symbioses. He showed for the first time a unique transcriptional signature in the coral host during larval exposure to mutualistic symbiodiniaceae alga (competent Symbiodinium) and parasitic chromerid alga (Chromera velia).

Following his PhD, Mohamed completed a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at CSIRO, Australia. During this postdoc, he worked in the area of Aquaculture genomics and was mainly interested in understanding the onset of sexual maturation in Atlantic salmon. He analyzed multi-tissue transcriptome and epigenome (DNA methylome and chromatin accessibility) data before constructing gene regulatory networks (GRNs), driving the transition to sexual maturation. Following this CSIRO fellowship, Mohamed was appointed as a research scientist for one year at CSIRO. He was involved in multiple projects while mainly interested in understanding host-parasite interaction during the progression of the amoebic gill disease (AGD) caused by the Ectoparasite Neoparamoeba.

In 2020, Mohamed held a 5-month postdoc at GEOMAR (Kiel, Germany), where he was involved in RNA-seq and WGS experiments within the "IMMUBASE" project aimed at understanding immune priming in basal marine invertebrates (sponges, jellyfish, and comb jellyfish). Following this brief position, he returned to Brisbane to join the University of Queensland's Institute of Molecular Biosciences (IMB). At UQ, he was involved in the "AgingAtlas" project aimed at understanding transcriptional networks underlying both cellular reprogramming and aging in mouse using RNA-seq, ATAC-seq, and spatial transcriptomics. Recently, he joined NYUAD as a research associate to work in the area of microbial oceanography at the marine microbial ecology group (Amin Lab).

Research

Amin is currently interested in understanding diatom-microbiome interactions and genomic basis of coral adaptation to the Persian/Arabian Gulf (PAG) environment. His work involves various 'omics applications including genome, transcriptome, metagenome sequencing as well as targeted meta-barcoding.