“We will never be successful and safe as a society unless we attend to all issues and all
people.”

Huda Zoghbi was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1954. Since a young age, Zoghbi was encouraged to pursue academics by her mother who emphasized the importance of education in securing Zoghbi’s independence as a woman in the middle east. Pursuing a medical career, Zoghbi enrolled in American University of Beirut (AUB) to study biology, then in AUB Medical Center in 1973. In 1976, however, Zoghbi’s studies were disrupted by the Lebanese Civil War, and Zoghbi transferred to Meharry Medical College in Nashville, TN. Through her studies, Zoghbi remained unable to return to Lebanon and finished her M.D. in the U.S. She then joined Baylor College of Medicine as a postdoctoral research in pediatric neurology. In 1988, Zoghbi launched her own lab as a professor at Baylor College of Medicine studying the genetics of many neurological diseases, including Rett syndrome, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, autism, and various intellectual disabilities. Notably, Zoghbi diagnosed the first cases of Rett syndrome in the U.S. and corrected many previous misdiagnoses. Zoghbi identified the disease to originate from mutations in the X chromosome and challenged contemporary ideas that sporadic neurological diseases could not be genetic. Today, Zoghbi continues to research treatments for neurological diseases as a professor of Molecular and Human Genetics. For her work, Zoghbi was awarded the Brain Prize and Kavli prize among many more honors.