Where Legacy Meets Global Excellence
She was the first Emirati to enter the field of equine medicine. Today, Badria Al Jaziri directs one of the most advanced equine hospitals in the world – and in doing so, she is quietly rewriting what leadership looks like in the Gulf’s racing story.
There is a particular kind of courage required to walk into a room where no one looks like you and say: ‘Please, just try me.’ That is precisely what Badria Al Jaziri did in 2010, when she cold-called the reception at Dubai Equine Hospital after spending her Sundays preparing nuclear isotopes at the Dubai Health Authority. She was a human medicine nuclear specialist, an Emirati and a woman – the very first of all three things to walk through those doors.
The process took a year. Four interviews, each designed to test whether she was truly ready for the crossing from human to equine medicine. Her answer, each time, was the same: “Yes. Just allow me. Just try me.” She reflects today: “I decided I had to be brave enough to market myself – to let my work, not just my CV, speak for me.”
15 years later, having built the hospital’s nuclear medicine capability from the ground up and mastered equine MRI under a specialist in Newmarket, Al Jaziri took up the directorship of Dubai Equine Hospital in July 2025.
“I have always believed that we must be gladiators in this life. The true joy of success comes only after working incredibly hard.”
It is a conviction shaped, in part, by a principle she draws from the example of HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum: “Opportunities are not afforded to those constrained by fear, hesitation or unproductive discourse, but to those who combine faith in God with decisive and purposeful action.” “I learned from his journey,” she says, “and decided to apply the same principle to my own.”
A SENIOR RADIOGRAPHER AND RADIATION PROTECTION OFFICER FIRST
For 15 years before the directorship, the MRI room was her second home. Horses arrived as diagnostic puzzles: lame, in pain, their conditions undetected by X-ray, ultrasound or nerve block. With the patient under standing sedation, it fell to Al Jaziri to locate the abnormality, scan it from multiple angles and produce the report that would shape the entire treatment plan. Her patients came from all the seven Emirates, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and other GCC countries – some were transported by plane but also by truck and car for many hours. Their connections would wait at a nearby hotel for news. The MRI machine she operated was the only one in the Middle East.
Those who warned Al Jaziri that horses could be dangerous were not wrong. “There was a person who told me that a horse can kill you – and he was right,” she recalls. “When you are with a sedated horse in a closed room for a long time, you can’t guarantee his attitude.” But where others might have stepped back, she stepped forward, taking it as a challenge rather than a reason to say she could not do it. “I thank that person for sharing this with me,” she says. “I took it positively and took on this challenge.”
The Animal Health Trust (AHT) was a prominent UK-based veterinary and scientific research charity dedicated to improving the health and welfare of horses through specialised research, diagnostics and clinical services. Founded in 1942, it operated from Newmarket, Suffolk, providing expert veterinary care and groundbreaking research into inherited disease.
Training under mentor Dr Rachel Murray in Newmarket, she built her knowledge of equine anatomy and scanning protocol when communication was still by email alone. There was resistance at the hospital too, which she neither dismisses nor dwells on. “I was coming from human medicine, and I was the first Emirati. But I was able to prove to all of them: let us work as a team and we will do it.”
THE MOVE INTO LEADERSHIP
It was Dr Ali Ridha Alhashmi, Director General, D1 Management, who saw something Al Jaziri herself had not yet seen, and asked her to complete an MBA at Canadian University. She did not rush the degree. But when it was done, he offered her the directorship. She accepted.
Since taking the role, she has increased Emirati team membership by 10 per cent, personally recruiting Emirati women into clinical and technical positions. Beyond the hospital walls, she can be found at the racecourse – watching her patients race once again. “Being around the racecourse is a different experience for me,” she says. “It is a joy for me to see my patients racing again and, in some cases, even winning.” That joy, she adds, must be held quietly – patient confidentiality means it cannot be shared openly.
She is equally present for owners and trainers who need answers. “They don’t need to come to us. We go to them. And when their horses win, it is our win.” She pauses, then offers what may be the simplest summary of her years in equine medicine: “This job is a passion for me, not just a task.”
Her leadership philosophy is rooted in trust and decisiveness.
THE ONLY ONES IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Dubai Equine Hospital is the only facility in the Middle East operating a gamma camera for equine scintigraphy – a diagnostic modality capable of detecting bone metabolic activity, stress fractures and inflammation invisible to conventional imaging. The isotope is injected, the horse waits two hours and the Emirati nuclear medicine technologist scans with the gamma camera, localising the abnormality with a precision that has made the hospital a global reference point. At the annual users meeting for the MRI scanner, the DEH team present the highest number of images for equines with suspensory problems in the world. “When the company wants to change a scanning protocol, they ask us. We are their partners because of the volume and expertise we bring.”
But the technology is not what she is most proud of. When Al Jaziri first joined Dubai Equine Hospital, she established the nuclear medicine facility from the ground up: setting up the hot lab, serving as Radiation Protection Officer and securing FANR – the Federal Authority for Nuclear Regulation – licensing for the hospital.
The scintigraphy scanning itself is performed by an Emirati woman she mentored, a dedicated nuclear medicine technologist who now also holds the Radiation Protection Officer designation. “Both of us are Emirati – and we are the only two women in the Middle East performing equine scintigraphy.”
A LEGACY STILL BEING WRITTEN
Her stated ambition before she leaves this role is to have an Emirati female surgeon in the operating theatre and an Emirati female internal medicine specialist on staff. “This project will take at least ten years. But I need to start from now. If I don’t start from now – trusting them, pushing them, choosing the right university for them – it will be too late.” The legacy she is building is not simply institutional greatness. It is a generation of women who find, when they arrive, that a door has already been opened.
The wider industry is shifting too. At the UAE Veterinary University, a recent equine veterinary intake numbered 16 students – only two of them male. Female jockeys, trainers and owners are a growing presence at Meydan and across the region. “It was very male-dominated as a whole,” Al Jaziri says, “but it is changing.”
Dubai Equine Hospital was built in six months in 1995 on the direct orders of Sheikh Mohammed, as a condition for staging the inaugural Dubai World Cup. When it opened, it stood alone – the first and only equine hospital in the Middle East, in a region where racing itself was still finding its feet.
Three decades on, other equine hospitals have sprung up across the Gulf, and the sport spans the entire Arabian Peninsula. Yet the surgery room and ICU here remain largely unchanged, because the standard set then has never needed replacing. Badria Al Jaziri did not build those walls. She is the one ensuring that what happens inside them still leads the world – and that the Emirati women who come after her will arrive to find the door already open.