Yosra Mekki MD

Dr. Yosra Mekki is a physician-scientist currently completing a PhD in biomedical engineering at the University of Oxford. She is interested in sports medicine and artificial intelligence, with particular interest in digitising football medicine. Her work has been published in journals such as the BMJ, Nature journals including npj Digital Medicine, Nature Reviews Bioengineering, as well as Cell Patterns, and IEEEXplore, earning several national and international research awards. For more information, please refer to her Google Scholar page.

Dr. Mekki graduated with her MD (Doctor of Medicine) from Qatar University’s School of Medicine in 2025, in Doha, the heart of sports in the region. In addition to local exposure to sports medicine and orthopaedics, she also had clinical and computational research experience at King’s College London, the Mayo Clinic, Harvard Teaching Hospitals, and Cambridge University NHS Hospitals.

She was the inaugural Nature Digital Medicine communications fellow, where she hosted the npj Digital Medicine podcast, which has had guests from every continent shaping digital medicine worldwide. She sits on the Editorial Board of Nature Digital Medicine and serves as a peer reviewer for journals under Elsevier, BMJ and Springer Nature. She was a visiting fellow at Mayo Clinic’s STR-X (Simulation, Telemedicine, Robotics and eXperimental Learning) program, as well as the Quinn NASA Lab at King’s College London. She currently is the research lead at the Clinician Engineer Hub based in Cambridge. She also leads Qatar’s national AI and XR healthcare network.uring her time at Qatar University, she developed innovative educational XR applications for antibiotic resistance as well as ML algorithms for COVID-19 pre-screening. She has been invited to speak/lecture at various seminars and conferences across the US, Europe and the Middle East. She has taught lectures for the medical AI elective at her medical school. She is an Ambassador for Google’s Tech Makers, and has served on several local and international medical AI scientific committees and strategic boards.

When asked about her long-term vision, she shared that she aspires to become a sports physician–engineer at the forefront of digital sports medicine, with a focus on advancing care and performance in football. She hopes to lead high-impact research in digital health technologies while providing world-class clinical care to athletes of all levels – from fitness enthusiasts to elite teams.

Editorial board, npj Digital Medicine

Founder/lead, Qatar AI and Emerging Technologies in Health Network

• Sports Medicine
• Digital Health
• Orthopaedic Surgery
• Football Medicine
• Biomechanics
• Image Analysis
• Artificial Intelligence

• Reuben Graduate Scholarship – University of Oxford
• Qatar University Full Scholarship – College of Medicine
• Qatar National Research Fund Grant – UREP
• Best Undergraduate Research Poster, Qatar University Annual Research Forum — 2025, 2020
• Best Demo Award, IEEE International Internet of Things Conference — 2020
• Cover Feature, Qatar University National Research Magazine — 2021

TA, Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, Spring 2023 and Spring 2024: Qatar University School of Medicine

TA, Molecular Biology and Genetics, Spring 2020: Qatar University School of Medicine

Selected talks:

• Seminar Series Lecture: “A True Lifecycle Approach to Healthcare AI,” AI & Emerging Technologies Seminar Series, The Mount Sinai Hospital, New York City, USA (2025).
• Podium Presentation – “Digital Twins for Personalized Orthopedic Surgery,” SICOT 2025 World Congress, Madrid, Spain (2025). “Towards Personalized Surgery Using Digital Twins” and “Digital Twins Pertinent to Femoroacetabular Impingement Syndrome.”
• Keynote – “Responsible Integration of AI into Workflows of International Sports Federations,” ASOIF Medical & Science Consultative Group Workshop, Lausanne, Switzerland (May 2025).
• Co-Chair – “AI in Sports Medicine,” Wednesday Webinar Series, Aspetar Sports and Orthopaedic Hospital (April 2025).
• Faculty – “Medical AI Collaboration Framework,” IOC World Conference on Prevention of Injury and Illness in Sport, Monte Carlo, Monaco (February 2024).
• Podium Presentation – “Digital Twins for Surgical Patients,” The Young Athlete’s Hip Conference and Workshops, University of Oxford, UK (September 2024).
• Grand Rounds Speaker – “AI in Medical Education,” Sidra Medicine, Doha, Qatar (September 2023).

Selected papers

Mekki YM, Luijten G, Hagert E, Belkhair S, Varghese C, Qadir J, et al. Digital twins for the era of personalized surgery. npj Digital Medicine, 8(1):283, 2025.

Mekki YM, Rhim HC, Daneshvar D, Pouliopoulos AN, Curtin C, Hagert E. Applications of artificial intelligence in ultrasound imaging for carpal-tunnel syndrome diagnosis: a scoping review. International Orthopaedics, 2025.

Mekki YM, Simon LV, Freeman WD, Qadir J. Medical Education Metaverses (MedEd Metaverses): Opportunities, Use Cases, and Guidelines. IEEE Computer, 58(3):60–70, 2025.

Mekki YM, Sandon A, Hagert E. Arthroscopic management of metacarpophalangeal joint synovial chondromatosis. Journal of Wrist Surgery, 2024 (online 2025).

Solaiman B, Mekki YM, Qadir J, Ghaly M, Abdelkareem M, Al-Ansari A. A “True Lifecycle Approach” towards governing healthcare AI with the GCC as a global governance model. Nature Digital Medicine, 2025.

Dijkstra P, Greenhalgh T, Mekki YM, Morley J. How to read a paper involving artificial intelligence (AI). BMJ Medicine, 4(1), 2025.

lkaeed M, Abioye S, Qayyum A, Mekki YM, Berrou I, Abdallah M, et al. Open foundation models in healthcare: Challenges, paradoxes, and opportunities with GenAI-driven personalized prescription. arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.04356, 2025.

Mekki YM, Ahmed OH, Powell D, Price A, Dijkstra HP. Games Wide Open: Athlete partnership in building artificial intelligence systems. Nature Digital Medicine, 2024.

Mekki YM, Zughaier SM. Teaching artificial intelligence in medicine. Nature Reviews Bioengineering, 1–2, 2024.

Mekki YM. Physicians should build their own machine-learning models. Cell Patterns, 5(3), 2024.

Zar SMZ*, Zar L*, Mohsen S*, Mekki Y*, Zughaier S. A comprehensive review of algorithms developed for rapid pathogen detection and surveillance. Springer, 2024.

Banga A, Mautong H, Alamoudi R, Faisal UH, Bhatt G, Amal T…Mekki Y et al. ViSHWaS: Violence study of healthcare workers and systems — a global survey. BMJ Global Health, 8(9):e013101, 2024.

Nawaz FA, Mekki YM, Tharwani ZH, Khan HA, Shaeen SK, Boillat T, et al. Toward a meta-vaccine future: Promoting vaccine confidence in the metaverse. Digital Health, 9:20552076231171477, 2023.

Rahman T, Ibtehaz N, Khandakar A, Hossain MSA, Mekki YMS, et al. QUCoughScope: An intelligent application to detect COVID-19 patients using cough and breath sounds. Diagnostics, 12(4):920, 2022.

Zaidi A, Elmasaad A, Alobaidli H, Sayed R, Al-Ali D, Al-Kuwari D, Mekki Y et al. Attitudes and intentions toward COVID-19 vaccination among health professions students and faculty in Qatar. Vaccines, 9(11):1275, 2021.

Mekki YM, Mekki MM, Hammami MA, Zughaier SM. Virtual reality module depicting catheter-associated urinary tract infection as an educational tool to reduce antibiotic-resistant hospital-acquired bacterial infections. In: 2020 IEEE International Conference on Informatics, IoT, and Enabling Technologies (ICIoT), 2020.

Oman SP, Magdi Y, Simon LV. Past, present, and future of simulation in internal medicine, 2019.