Dr Yosra Mekki is a physician-scientist. She is currently completing a PhD in biomedical engineering at the University of Oxford. She interested in sports medicine and artificial intelligence, with particular interest in digitising football medicine. Her work has been published with 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.
During 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.
