Bioinformatics in Middle East program curricula—a focus on the Arabian Gulf Samia Loucif Published online: 27 October 2012 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2012 Abstract The purpose of this paper is to investigate the inclusion of bioinformatics in program curricula in the Middle East, focusing on educational institutions in the Arabian Gulf. Bioinformatics is a multidisciplinary field which has emerged in response to the need for efficient data storage and retrieval, and accurate and fast computational and statistical methods to handle huge amounts of biological data. Bioinformatics is an important field and has great impact on advances in biological, medical, and pharmaceutical research. Although, several worldwide universities have already implemented bioinformatics in their undergraduate and postgraduate pro- grams for more than a decade, the results of our investigation show that very few educational institutions (less than 1 %) have recently implemented bioinformatics in their undergraduate programs. Therefore, it is important to promote this field in the region and to include it in undergraduate program curricula, and thereby introducing students to bioinformatics tools for solving biological problems, preparing them for future careers taking into account job market trends, and preparing students who wish to pursue research career to make significant contribution to the field. Keywords Bioinformatics . Education . Curriculum . Computational biology 1 Introduction Bioinformatics is an emerging multidisciplinary field. Students are required to devel- op knowledge and skills in several areas, namely biology, computer science, math- ematics and statistics. The areas of study are applied to the investigation and analysis of biological data. Bioinformatics has attracted great interest from academia and industry. In industry, many pharmaceutical companies fund bioinformatics/medical research centres (Dorsey et al. 2009) and therefore have a great need for people who Educ Inf Technol (2014) 19:375–382 DOI 10.1007/s10639-012-9220-1 S. Loucif (*) Department of Software Engineering, AlHosn University, Abu Dhabi, PO Box: 38772, United Arab Emirates e-mail: samia.loucif@ieee.org