Shahinaz Mohamed Aly Gadalla was born to Mohamed and Sabah.[1] She earned a M.B.Bch from Ain Shams University Faculty of Medicine In 1996.[1][2] She completed a medical internship in 1998 at Ain Shams University Hospitals.[1] Gadallah completed a M.S. (2005) in epidemiology and preventative medicine and a Ph.D. (2008) in epidemiology from the University of Maryland, Baltimore.[1][2] Her dissertation was titled, Systemic autoimmune rheumatic diseases and breast cancer risk in elderly women.[1] Sania Amr was her doctoral advisor.[1] Gadalla dedicated her dissertation to her daughter.[1] She joined the clinical genetics branch (CGB) within the National Cancer Institute (NCI) division of cancer epidemiology and genetics as a cancer prevention fellow in 2008.[2]
Gadalla was promoted to a staff scientist in 2011 and was appointed as an Earl Stadtman Tenure-Track Investigator in 2014.[2] She was awarded National Institutes of Health (NIH) scientific tenure and appointed senior investigator in 2022.[2] Gadalla's research interests focus on identifying and characterizing individuals at high risk of developing cancer and discovering predictive and prognostic biomarkers that may guide therapeutic decisions for those patients.[2] In 2011, Gadalla and colleagues were the first to report epidemiological evidence of excess cancer risk in myotonic dystrophy (DM) patients.[2] She also researches molecular predictors of outcomes after hematopoietic cell transplantation.[2] Gadalla's work focuses on severe aplastic anemia and myeloid neoplasms with a goal of identifying biomarkers that can guide donor selection or patient risk stratification.[2] Her investigations include markers of cellular aging, germline genetic variants, and somatic copy-number alterations.[2]
