Joel A. Malek is an Associate Professor of Genetic Medicine and Director of the Genomics Core Laboratory at Weill Cornell Medicine - Qatar (WCM-Q). He received his B.S. in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics from UCLA, his M.S. in Biotechnology from the Johns Hopkins University, and his Ph.D. in Cellular and Molecular Biology from the University Paris-Sud 11, France. Prior to joining WCM-Q, he held positions at the Institute for Genomic Research, Agencourt Bioscience, and Applied Biosystems. He was involved in the Human Genome Project and the development of Next Generation DNA sequencing technologies. His research focuses on the development, application, and data analysis of genomic technologies.​

Abstract: The date palm is of high importance to countries across North Africa, the Middle East and parts of South Asia. Over the past decade our group and others have established genomic resources for the date palm and shown a significant amount of population structure related to regions of date palm cultivation. At the same time we have collected diverse date fruit samples to provide a resource allowing a better understanding of underlying genetic diversity and characteristics of  interest. The resource contains nearly 200 genome-sequenced date palm cultivars along with metabolomic and image date on 120 of the samples. Here I will present our work to map the genetic regions associated with sex determination, fruit sugar content, dry date fruit color and fruit length/weight. ​

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