Hayat Sindi

Hayat Sulaiman Sindi (born 6 November 1967 in Mecca) is a Saudi biotechnologist, the first Saudi woman to earn a PhD in biotechnology from the University of Cambridge in 2001, and the founder of the Diagnostics for All project developing low-cost medical tests; she was among the first women appointed to Saudi Arabia's Consultative Assembly in 2013 and has been a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for the sciences since 2012 ^{1 2}.

Sindi grew up in Mecca and in 1991 persuaded her family to let her study in England, where she learned English, took a pharmacology degree at King's College London in 1995, and in 2001 completed her Cambridge PhD in biotechnology, the first Saudi woman to do so, before further research at MIT and Harvard ^{1 2}. The English article records that she wears the traditional Muslim headscarf and was pressured at university to abandon her religious and cultural beliefs, which she refused, holding that a person's religion, colour or gender has no bearing on scientific contributions; no text read names a legal school for her, so her faith is recorded as unknown ^{1 2 3}.

Her research centres on sensor devices for early diagnosis that work in low-resource settings: with colleagues she founded Diagnostics for All to build paper-based tests needing neither electricity nor a laboratory, and she founded the i2 Institute for Imagination and Ingenuity in Jeddah to support young researchers ^{1 2}. She was named a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for the sciences in 2012, in January 2013 was one of the first thirty women to enter the Saudi Consultative Assembly, was ranked by Arabian Business among the most influential Arab women, and was listed among the BBC's 100 Women in 2018 ^{1 2}.

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