Shahinaz Bedri MD FCAP
Board Member
Country: Sudan
Dr. Shahinaz Bedri serves as the Acting director of Sudan’s National Public Health Laboratory (NPHL) and Associate Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Ahfad University for Women, Omdurman, Sudan. Dr. Bedri spearheaded the expansion of COVID-19 laboratory testing in Sudan beginning in March 2020 after she was appointed as the first female acting director by the minister of health. She is currently working on the development and strengthening of the NPHL and six regional public health laboratories utilizing the COVID-19 pandemic testing framework to ensure a timely response in other endemic diseases. She has specific interests in developing capacities of staff and building teams, and in setting strategic frameworks and policies for public health laboratories in LIMICs and she has made both the focus of her mandate. She is currently on leave from her position as an academic pathologist at Ahfad University for Women and was prior to that faculty at Weill Cornell Medicine in Qatar. She is a graduate of the Faculty of Medicine, University of Khartoum and completed her postgraduate training in Pathology at both Tufts University and Harvard Medical School. In her current role at the NPHL, Sudan. Dr Bedri oversees five hundred employees and more than twenty reference and regulatory as well as diagnostic laboratories, including a newly established genomics& bioinformatics unit. She also oversees the National influenza center and the national and regional TB& HIV reference laboratories and developing policies and strategies for the public health laboratories and testing platforms. Aside from Dr. Bedri’s interest in laboratory and public health systems strengthening she has a keen interest in health security, forensic pathology, health and human rights, and refugee and migratory medicine and is frequently called on by health and other partners to participate in taskforces in these areas. Her current research interests are in infectious disease, reproductive cancers, and biomarkers of disease as targets of therapy and prognosis.