Professor Sheikh is an internationally renowned medical executive, distinguished clinician-scientist, and widely sought after thought leader and innovator in global academic medicine. As the Dean of the groundbreaking Weill Cornell Medicine in Qatar (WCM-Q), he is the Chief Academic Officer of the first successful international branch campus of a US, research-intensive graduate medical school to grant a medical degree from a US university. WCM-Q graduates have distinguished themselves as peers of the best and the brightest of their US and global counterparts and are now part of the next generation of physicians and physician-scientists serving this region and the rest of the world.

In addition to the new and innovative model of undergraduate medical education at WCM-Q, Dean Sheikh has also built the first Academic Center for Translational and Clinical Research, where the collaborative work of clinicians and scientists is focused on the unique populations of the MENA region. Under his leadership, WCM-Q has attracted a critical mass of world-class educators, biomedical scientists, and superb clinicians who are actively fulfilling Qatar’s national vision of transforming itself from a petrochemical to a knowledge-based economy with the objective of improving the lives of its citizens.

To support the ongoing professional development of healthcare practitioners Dean Sheikh established a Division of Continuing Professional Development at WCM-Q that recently became the first such program in the region to be accredited by the US Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME), a very important step in maintaining world-class physician performance and delivery of high quality medical care. During the last few years, Dean Sheikh has also led the conceptualization and implementation of comprehensive programs to advance health promotion and disease prevention for the general population of Qatar by cultivating healthy behaviors in school age children, and by designing and conducting population-based, longitudinal studies to assess the efficacy of these interventions.