Omar is a sixth-year MD/PhD student in the Harvard–MIT Program of Health Sciences and Technology. He received his B.S. in mechanical and biological engineering from MIT in 2012, where he was awarded the top prize in the engineering school. In his graduate studies in Feng Zhang’s lab at the Broad Institute, he has co-lead studies reporting the discovery and characterization of novel CRISPR enzymes, including the first single-enzyme RNA-targeting CRISPR-Cas system (CRISPR-Cas13a). He later developed the Cas13a system into the SHERLOCK platform for nucleic acid detection. His work has resulted in 20 research publications in journals, such as Nature, Science, and Cell and has been funded through the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship, National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship, and the NIH National Research Service Award.