Loading ...Pathbreakers of Arab America—Huda Zoghbi
By: John Mason / Arab America Contributing Writer
This is the eighty-eighth in Arab America’s series on American pathbreakers of Arab descent. The series features personalities from various fields, including entertainment, business, sports, science, the arts, academia, journalism, and politics. Our eighty-eighth pathbreaker is Huda Zoghbi, a Lebanese-born American geneticist, clinician-scientist, and a physician specializing in pediatric neurology. Her research led her and others to the discovery of the genes and genetic mechanisms responsible for several devastating neurological disorders, including Alzheimer’s, Rett syndrome, and autism. Huda is celebrated for her collegiality and for mentoring innumerable admiring students and fellows.
A pioneer in new ways of thinking about neurological disorders, Huda Zoghby has contributed significantly to new therapies and treatments
Huda Yahya Zoghbi was born Huda El-Hibri on June 20, 1954, in Beirut, Lebanon. Her father owned a business that made olive oil and olive oil soap, and her mother was a homemaker. As Huda noted in her autobiography, “My parents loved learning and I grew up in a house that had an enormous library stocked floor to ceiling with books.”
Not surprisingly, as a youth, Huda loved literature, and in high school she believed that she was destined to pursue that field in university. However, Huda’s mother convinced her to study biology instead, believing that “a woman growing up in the Middle East should pick a career ensuring independence and security, while she can always write on the side.” Zoghbi followed that advice and was admitted as a biological sciences major at the American University of Beirut (AUB) in 1973. Two years later, she entered the university’s medical school.
In 1976, during Huda’s first year of medical school, the Lebanese Civil War began. That War would leave an indelible mark on her, since after her brother was injured by shrapnel, their parents sent them to live with their sister in Austin, Texas, with plans to return the following summer. The war, however, raged on. Confirming that Huda would not be able to return to Lebanon, she looked for an opportunity to transfer to an American medical school.
Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, accepted Huda readily, even though school had already been in session for two months. Despite her continued desire to return to Lebanon the next summer, her AUB professors convinced her to stay at Meharry. She earned an MD degree in 1979 and subsequently joined the Texas Children’s Hospital at Baylor College of Medicine as a pediatric resident.
Huda wrote in her autobiography, “Medical school changed the course of my life. I met the love of my life, William Zoghbi, who has been my greatest joy for the past 40 years and father to our two precious children, Roula and Anthony.” She also noted that medical school was responsible for bringing her and her then-future husband to the U.S.
Huda and William both qualified for residency at Baylor. And, while initially focused on pursuing pediatric cardiology, her mentor at Baylor helped her to find her true challenge and love in medicine, namely, to become a child neurologist. By then, her husband, William, eventually became the chief of the Department of Cardiology at Houston Methodist Hospital.
In 1983, while at Texas Children’s Hospital, Huda talked about how the course of her life changed again. There, she met a five-year-old girl with Rett syndrome—a new ‘clinical entity’ that she had learned about from a newly published paper by Hagberg and colleagues. No sooner than she’d read about this condition, she encountered a second girl with Rett. As Huda noted, “The girls are born apparently healthy, but around 12-18 months they begin wringing their hands continuously and lose their acquired motor and language skills.” She thought that this condition was most probably genetic.
Zoghby continued her search for similar cases of Rett and identified six more girls with that syndrome. “Not only was this a puzzling constellation of symptoms, but the mechanism of disease was enigmatic, too: there was no apparent defect at birth, nor was there degeneration of the brain. I felt compelled to pursue research to understand the cause and be able to offer parents some kind of hope for treatment.” That led to a post-doctoral fellowship under the tutelage of Dr. Art Beaudet, who mentored her in molecular genetics.
Huda then became involved in studying what is called ‘adult ataxia syndrome,’ which “promised to be more tractable to genetic methods than a sporadic disorder like Rett.” That collaboration led to her starting her own lab studying ‘Spinocerebellar Ataxia Type 1’. For the technologically inclined, Spinocerebellar Ataxia Type 1 (SCA1) “is a rare, progressive neurological disorder caused by mutations in the ATXN1 gene, leading to coordination and balance issues, typically beginning in early adulthood.” This joint discovery led to medicinal solutions to the problem.
Huda had not forgotten about Rett syndrome, and in 1996, she became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, and the Rett families agreed to support a postdoc in her lab. There, her lab partners discovered the mutations that Rett caused. As Huda noted, “The discovery of the Rett syndrome gene remains the most hard-won and personally important to me. I am forever grateful to the Rett families who trusted in me and to the tireless trainees who took a huge risk working on this project…” She was later honored to share the Shaw Prize for her work on Rett.
Zoghby’s work not only led to the discovery of the genes and genetic mechanisms responsible for many devastating neurological disorders, including the aforementioned Rett syndrome and spinocerebellar ataxia type 1. Importantly, it also resulted in new ways of thinking about other neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, autism, and intellectual disability.
A career steeped in honors, Huda Zoghbi has received some of the most prestigious prizes in American medicine
Zoghby’s current positions alone almost boggle the mind:
–Professor at the Department of Molecular and Human Genetics at Baylor
–With appointments as a professor at the Department of Neuroscience and the Department of Pediatrics Section of Neurology and Developmental Neuroscience
–The Ralph Feigin, M.D. Endowed Chair
–The director of the Texas Children’s Hospital, Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute
–A member of the Dan L. Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center at Baylor
–An investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and
–A member of the board of directors of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals.
Huda has received numerous other honors and awards, including the Vilcek Prize for Biomedical Research (2009), Gruber Prize in Neuroscience (2011), Breakthrough Prize in Life Science (2017), and the Brain Prize (2020). She is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Inventors. She also holds the National Order of the Cedar, Lebanon.
Two final points about Huda Zoghby underscore her emotional commitment to her work and her patients, then her commitment to all the professionals working with and around her.
First, to the emotional commitment: “What I did not realize at the time was the emotional pain I would feel in that specialty (Rett)…” Every day at Texas Children’s Hospital, I sat with parents and had to tell them that their child had a disorder whose cause was probably genetic but we could not be certain. What was certain was that their child would suffer and perhaps die prematurely, and there was nothing we could do to help. Many nights, I went home and cried over the bad news I had to deliver.”
Then, to Huda’s commitment to her colleagues: “My other extended family of trainees, technicians, and staff, the ‘Zoghbians,’ as they like to refer to themselves, made my science career a most rewarding one. I am grateful for their dedication, patience, trust, and friendship. They taught me so much and made me look forward to coming to work every day. Their hard work, commitment, and passion give me faith that neurobiological disease research will be in capable hands for decades to come.”
“Bravo alayk, ya Doctor!” It is you who are the source of medical-technical excellence, of compassion to your many suffering patients, and of generosity and goodwill towards your colleagues and students.
Sources:
“Huda Zoghby,” Wikipedia Series on Arab Americans, 2025
“Huda Y. Zoghby Autobiography,” Wayback Magazine (original date: 9/27/2016), 4/26/2025
“2022 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience, Huda Zoghby,” Laureates, 2022
John Mason, Ph.D., focuses on Arab culture, society, and history and is the author of LEFT-HANDED IN AN ISLAMIC WORLD: An Anthropologist’s Journey into the Middle East, New Academia Publishing, 2017. He has taught at the University of Libya, Benghazi, Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, and the American University in Cairo; John served with the United Nations in Tripoli, Libya, and consulted extensively on socioeconomic and political development for USAID and the World Bank in 65 countries.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab America. The reproduction of this article is permissible with proper credit to Arab America and the author.
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