Dr Aref is a Medical Oncologist with ten years of clinical practice experience working across the University hospital sector in Egypt from 2005 to 2009 and then in prestigious medical oncology centres across the Gulf countries (United Arab Emirates & Bahrain) from 2009 until 2016. His special interests are medical oncology, cancer research, cancer proteomics, biomarker discovery and clinical trials methodology.
In 2016, he moved to Australia to start a PhD by research in Medicine under the supervision of Prof Lisa Butler at the University of Adelaide and completed this in 2019. His PhD project investigated the influence of metabolic factors on prostate cancer screening models, prostate cancer incidence, and aggressiveness. During his PhD, he gained experience in epidemiological and statistical methodology and modelling using R software, particularly in regression, survival, and competing risk analysis.
In 2020, Dr Aref started working as a Senior Analyst – Health Technology Assessment at the School of Public Health, University of Adelaide. During this appointment, he obtained more experience and knowledge in assessing clinical trial methods and designs (mainly in cancer-related therapeutics).
In July 2021, Dr Aref moved to his current position as the Senior Researcher and Team Lead- Oncology in the Proteomics of Cancer program (ProCan®) at Children's Medical Research Institute. He is the biological lead on several ongoing projects, with his role involves designing, initiating, following up and contributing to the analysis of several projects that aim to explore various diagnostic and prognostic proteomic-based biomarkers in a range of cancer types.
Dr Aref has been awarded several scholarships & grants, including the competitive IPRS scholarship from the University of Adelaide in 2016, the Royal Adelaide Hospital Clinical Research project grant in 2018, the Dean's Commendation for Doctoral Thesis Excellence in 2019, and Cure Cancer ECR Grant 2023. He is also a member of several cancer societies and research committees, including AACR, Breast Cancer Trials AU, ANZUP, GRADE-JBI, SA-PCCOC, AGITG, and the BGICS.