Niyaz Ahmed

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT NIYAZ AHMED

Prof. Niyaz Ahmed is a leader in the area of molecular infection epidemiology and public health microbiology and an experienced Senior Director of Laboratories with a demonstrated history of working at the interface of epidemiology, genomics and laboratory sciences. Skilled in innovation management and capacity building of young scientists, Prof. Ahmed is currently serving as Senior Professor (Academic Level 15) at the University of Hyderabad (UoH); earlier he served as the Chairperson of the Dept. of Biotechnology & Bioinformatics at the UoH. At UoH, Prof. Ahmed taught diverse courses such as Metagenomics, Intellectual Property Rights, Biosafety and Bioethics as well as Cell Biology and Comparative Systems Modelling and supervised 20 PhD students, so far. Prof. Ahmed’s main research interest is about how bacteria interact with humans and the environment in order to evolve fitness advantages such as multiple drug-resistance and strain/host specific virulence? Prof. Ahmed’s research work embodied in about 180 international publications remains highly cited and recognized (H-index: 58). Consequently, Prof. Ahmed was elected to the fellowships of the National Academy of Sciences of India, the Royal Society of Biology (UK), the Royal Society of Chemistry (UK), and the American Academy of Microbiology (AAM). Prof. Ahmed freelances for Gut Pathogens journal published by Springer/Nature (London) as its Founder and Chief Editor since January 2009. Prof. Ahmed also served as Senior Director of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b) at an international professional scale of (UN) D1/step 8. While at icddr,b, he contributed to several developmental reforms, both as Senior Director and as Research Integrity Officer. He was a member of the senior leadership team of icddr,b and a member of its Central Committee when icddr,b received the Hilton Humanitarian Award, as an organization, in 2017 (world\'s largest humanitarian prize, pegged at USD 2.5 Million). Prof. Ahmed brought several new grants/programs, initiated genomics research and created world-class facilities at icddr,b. He majorly contributed to augment the revenues of icddr,b through spearheading high quality diagnostic services and by developing state of art laboratory facilities, containment areas, biorepositories, bioinformatics platforms, animal house and a modern, centralized specimens reception area interfaced with an scalable LIMS system; all fully self-sustaining and benchmarked as per ISO15189 and ISO15190 accreditation regimes.