Dr Abdullatif al-Khal, Hamad Medical Corporation’s ( HMC) deputy chief medical officer and chairman of the National Pandemic Preparedness Committee, will today address Texas A&M University at Qatar’s (Tamuq) Al Maerifa Public Seminar Series via Zoom. 
In his talk, “Qatar's Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic: Lessons Learned,” al-Khal will give a brief description of the status of the pandemic and describe briefly the measures taken by Qatar to contain it.
The Al Maerifa virtual series features 45-minute seminars to promote knowledge on topics centred around Qatar’s grand challenges and research pursuits. The talks in English are designed for a general, non-technical audience. Participants will be invited to ask questions at the end of the presentation.
The Al Maerifa Public Seminar Series continues the partner university’s core mission of sharing knowledge with the local community in Qatar, said Dr Cesar Octavio Malave, dean of Tamuq.
“As an institution of higher education in Qatar, we aim to share knowledge with the whole community,” Malave said. “The Al Maerifa Public Seminar Series helps us achieve that goal, and we are honoured to have a leader such as Dr al-Khal joining us for this lecture to discuss the steps Qatar has taken to contain and combat the spread of the coronavirus.”

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Dr al-Khal earned his MBBCh from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in 1989. He undertook his internship at HMC and in 1991 joined the Internal Medicine Residency Training Programme at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine (US), followed by completion of a two-year fellowship in Infectious Diseases at Hartford Hospital. He was awarded the diploma of the American Board in Internal Medicine in 1994 and diploma of the American Board of Infectious Diseases in 1996, and was recertified in Infectious Disease in 2013.
Dr al-Khal holds several clinical positions, chairs a variety of committees and has led number of strategic projects at HMC. Since 1998, he has been the head of Infectious Diseases Division and the lead of the Communicable Disease Centre, where he is the National TB Programme manager and director of the Clinical Aids Programme. As deputy chief medical officer and director of medical education, he has led HMC’s achievement of ACGME-I accreditation, and in 2018 received ACGME’s Physician International Award in recognition of his outstanding contributions to improving the quality of graduate medical education in Qatar. He also has an advisory role to several public health programmes under the umbrella of Qatar’s Ministry of Public Health.
Dr al-Khal is an adjunct professor of clinical medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine – Qatar and clinical professor of medicine at Qatar University College of Medicine (CMED). He is also the director of the QU CMED Clinical Affairs Department and was the college’s founding associate dean for clinical affairs. He remains active in research and publishes regularly in the fields of Internal Medicine, Pharmacology, Infectious Diseases and Medical Education.