After years of research in the field of rheumatology and long hours devoted to teaching students, Israeli doctor Abdulla Watad will receive the title of professor at the tender age of 35.
Hailing from the Arab council of Jatt in northern Israel, Watad is poised to become one of the youngest professors in the country.
An internal medicine ward deputy manager and senior rheumatologist at Sheba Medical Center, Watad was guided by Prof. Howard Amital, director of the hospital's Department of Internal Medicine B and Research Center for Autoimmune Diseases
"This is the result of hard work," Watad said. "It was quite early on that I appreciated the importance of the study I was conducting. In the first month of my residency, I approached Prof. Yehuda Shoenfeld, a senior expert on autoimmune diseases at Sheba, and then finished my first study on antibodies in rheumatoid arthritis which I presented in 2014 in Nice, France. From there, it's all history. Then I increasingly put my focus on rheumatoid diseases."
Around that time, he finished his residency in internal medicine and took up a new study in England. He is signed on more than 200 scientific papers.
"In order to succeed you need four things," he says. "Will, a defined goal, hard work and a mentor that believes in you. A man has to believe in himself and know that he can go far. He must believe that he can do it."