Scientist III
U.S. Food and Drug Administration
Mai Mehanna received her bachelor’s degree in pharmaceutical sciences in 2010 from Misr International University, Egypt. She earned the American Board Certification in Pharmacotherapy in 2011. Mai worked as a clinical research associate at the Children’s Cancer Hospital from 2012 to 2015. Thereafter, she received a Fulbright scholarship to pursue her master’s degree in Pharmacotherapy and Translational Research which she earned in May 2017 from the University of Florida. There, she studied the field of pharmacogenomics and personalized medicine, and her research work was focused on the role of plasma renin activity biomarker in personalizing antihypertensive drug therapy. In May 2018, she received a graduate assistantship from the University of Florida to pursue her PhD in pharmacogenomics and precision medicine. During her time as a PhD student, Mai studied the metabolomic underpinnings of the factors contributing to variability in blood pressure responses to antihypertensive drugs in European and African American hypertensive patients. During her training at the University of Florida, Mai had five peer-reviewed manuscripts as a first author and presented numerous abstracts at national research conferences. Her research was also selected for several awards. In January 2023, Mai started working as an ORISE Fellow at the Division of Applied Regulatory Science (DARS), Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER), U.S. FDA, where she continues to improve her skills in multi-omics research, bioinformatics, and precision medicine. Currently, she works as a Scientist within DARS, CDER, U.S. FDA, where she analyzes different omics data for identifying pharmacodynamic biomarkers for biosimilarity assessment.