Maha Al-Thani is a Research Fellow at Qatar Biomedical Research Institute, specializing in human iPSC disease modeling and neurovascular co-cultures. She earned her PhD in Clinical Neurosciences from the University of Cambridge, where her dissertation focused on developing novel hiPSC-derived models for cerebral small vessel disease (COL4A1/2 and HTRA1 variants). This groundbreaking work, which was later used in a drug-screening collaboration with AstraZeneca, was funded by a consortium of leading UK research foundations. In her current research, she is applying this expertise to model the blood-brain barrier in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), aiming to uncover its role in the neurobiology of autism.