The Scientist

Nauf AlBendar has a BSc in Molecular Genetics from Kings College London and an MSc in Nutrition and Food Science. Her dissertation focused on the impact of a rich OMEGA 3 diet during pregnancy and the concentration and trace of immune factors in Breast Milk.

She also worked at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. She helped advance the aim of Dr Mehmet Inan's project on autism and the methylation of repeated sequences such as ALU and LINE in the whole autistic genome.

In 2010, she was offered a scholarship to complete her PhD at Imperial College London in clinical medicine with a speciality in Development Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD). This led to understanding the impact of visceral adipose tissue and ectopic fat (mainly liver and pancreatic fat content) on obesity and metabolism and assessing the potential impact of environmental factors on fat deposition in healthy volunteers and adults born prematurely.

She worked at the Robert Steiner MRI Unit at the Hammersmith Hospital in developing an anatomical compartmentalisation technique to look at fat content and distribution in different organs using the non-invasive Multi-Echo MR Imaging technique.

AlBendar has been periodically speaking at obesity conferences and seminars, which can have more than 25,000 visitors and speakers. She has had to deliver speeches when receiving awards regarding her other projects.

Read Dr. AlBendar's PhD thesis and publication