Professor Selwa Al-Hazzaa built a medical career of firsts long before she founded a technology company. Trained at King Saud University and later at Johns Hopkins’ Wilmer Eye Institute, where she completed fellowships in pathology, genetics, and retina, Al-Hazzaa returned to Saudi Arabia to become, in 1997, the first woman to head a clinical department at King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center — a position she held for 25 years as chairman of ophthalmology. She was selected as personal ophthalmologist to the late King Fahd bin Abdulaziz, and became the first woman from the Middle East, and the only female ophthalmologist among the five continents, to serve on the Executive Council of the International Council of Ophthalmology, where she was honored as “Physician of the Five Continents.”
Her clinical breakthroughs continued alongside her leadership. In November 2019, Al-Hazzaa became the first surgeon in the Middle East to administer the Luxturna gene therapy injection for inherited retinal disease linked to the RPE65 mutation, making Saudi Arabia the fifth country in the world to offer the treatment. She has authored more than 70 published articles and book chapters and holds academic appointments at Alfaisal University and the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine.
In 2019, Al-Hazzaa founded SDM, an AI-powered diagnostic health-tech company built on the premise that retinal imaging can detect chronic diseases — including diabetes, glaucoma, hypertension, and Alzheimer’s — earlier and more accessibly than conventional screening. As Chairman of the Board and Founder, she has steered SDM’s growth alongside co-founder Naif Al-Obaidallah, extending the company’s research into space science through a 2025 partnership studying ocular health aboard a SpaceX mission.
Al-Hazzaa’s trajectory — from a groundbreaking clinical career to founding a health-tech startup in her sixties — reflects a rare arc: a physician using deep specialist expertise to build the diagnostic infrastructure she spent a career practicing within.
