Dr. Salman Althobaiti

Salman Althobaiti was born in Jeddah in 1986. He finished high school there in 2003, then joined the College of Medicine at Taibah University. Six years between lecture halls and the university hospital, and he graduated as a physician in 2009.

After graduating, he worked as a teaching assistant in the Department of Psychiatry at Taibah University's College of Medicine between 2010 and 2012. Those two years deepened his interest in understanding human behavior and the motives behind decision-making. He then chose to specialize in community medicine, joining the Saudi Board of Community Medicine in 2012 and completing it in 2016.

Between 2012 and 2015, he was a co-founding partner in hotel-unit management ventures, where the company managed more than 250 hotel units under both seasonal and annual leasing. After a period of growth and operation, he exited those ventures and turned, from 2016 onward, to real estate development and construction projects — his first being the development of a residential building of 35 units.

In August 2018, he traveled to Melbourne for a fellowship in preventive mental health at the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Monash University, Australia — one of the world's top ten universities. Over a full year, he took part in advanced research work that produced two published systematic studies on the effectiveness of interpersonal psychotherapy for post-traumatic stress disorder. He returned to the Kingdom in August 2019.

After his return, he founded the Preventive Mental Health Clinics group at Taibah University's Medical Services Center — among them the smoking-cessation clinic, where he earned NCTTP accreditation from the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He also served as an international reviewer for the global SRNT tobacco-control program.
In 2020, he was appointed Director of the Graduate Program in Preventive Medicine and Public Health at Taibah University, a post he held until January 2025. During that period he developed two academic courses: Preventive Mental Health in 2020, and Systematic Reviews & Meta-Analysis in 2021. He also supervised more than 25 university clinics between 2022 and 2023.

In parallel with his academic path, Salman entered real estate development in Madinah. He works as a real estate project developer focused on large projects and compounds, coordinating the relationship between investors, landowners, and developers. He enters projects as an active partner — not a service provider — and applies a research methodology to evaluating opportunities: from economic indicators to entry cost, expected return, and risk.

Since 2023, Salman has served as Assistant Professor of Preventive Medicine and Public Health at Taibah University. In 2025 he joined the Research Ethics Committee and the Health Development Committee of the project to make Taibah a health-promoting university. That same year he co-authored a study on the relationship between kidney stones and the degree of hydronephrosis, and earned two certificates: AI in Healthcare from Johns Hopkins University, and AI Fundamentals from IBM SkillsBuild.
Today, Salman keeps his two tracks together without separation: academia in the lecture hall and the field in the project — one way of thinking, showing up in two places.