Ikram Blilou is a professor of plant science at KAUST. Her research aims to understand mechanisms regulating stem cell specification and maintenance in model plant species under challenging conditions. She also studies strategies of adaptation of desert plants within their native harsh environment with a particular focus on date palms. Blilou's work on date palms was the first to describe mechanisms controlling developmental programs during early growth and was awarded the first prize of the Khalifa International Award for Date Palm and Agricultural Innovation.​

Currently, Blilou's team is developing molecular tools for date palms that will help design strategies for improving date palm protection and production.​

Her team uses multidisciplinary approaches, including high-resolution microscopy, tissue culture and plant transformation, genome-editing technologies and transcriptional assays. The team also implements deep learning and computer vision to analyze and quantify dynamic processes in vivo ranging from protein associations to pathogen invasion, disease detection and growth quantification.​

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