Abdelilah Aboussekhra is currently Principal Scientist at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center, Riyadh. He is head of the Cancer Biology and Experimental Therapeutics Section and Chairman of the Molecular Oncology Department at the Research Center. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in Jun 1992 from Orsay University (Paris XI). From 1992 to 1995, he worked as a post-doctoral fellow in the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (Clare Hall, London) on the reconstitution of the nucleotide excision repair process in vitro using purified factors. In 1996, he joined the Institute of Cell Biology (ETH, Zurich) where he worked as an associate scientist for 2 years on the role of chromatin in modulating nucleotide excision repair. He joined King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center as Scientist and Head of the DNA Repair and Apoptosis Section in 1998. His major research interest has been the role of the tumor microenvironment in breast carcinogenesis, and the identification of efficient anti-cancer molecules as well as prognostic biomarkers. He has published more than 80 peer-reviewed papers with an h-index of 34 and an i10-index of 68.