Niyaz Ahmed

Dr Ahmed is currently working as Professor at the School of Life Sciences at the University of Hyderabad. He served as Senior Director from 1 November 2016 to March 2020 at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research (icddr,b), also as a member of the Senior Leadership Team (SLT) of the Centre .

Ahmed graduated in Veterinary Medicine in 1995 (Nagpur) and obtained further degrees in Animal Biotechnology (MS) (NDRI, Karnal) and Molecular Medicine (PhD) (Manipal University). In December 2008 he joined the University of Hyderabad as a member of the Faculty and served as Chairman of the Department of Biotechnology and Bioinformatics. He also served as Senior Director at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in Dhaka. Ahmed was also affiliated with the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia as a Visiting Professor of Molecular Biosciences at the Institute of Biological Sciences. He also serves as Adjunct Professor of the Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research, India.

Niyaz Ahmed served as Section Editor (Genomics and Microbiology) of PLoS ONE (from August 2008 to September 2013). Currently, he is providing editorial oversight to the "PLoS ONE Prokaryotic Genome Collection".[2] Ahmed also serves as a member of the PLoS International Advisory Group.[3] and was the founding Editor-in-Chief of Gut Pathogens, published by BioMed Central Ltd. (London). Ahmed is a member of the International Society for Genomic and Evolutionary Microbiology (Italy) and currently serves as its General Secretary. He is also a member of the Faculty of 1000 Biology[4] and has been elected to the Indian National Academy of Sciences.[5] Ahmed served as an panelist for the research proposals submitted to European Commission's Seventh Framework Program. Ahmed was admitted as Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in January 2015 and a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology in 2018.

Ahmed is serving or has served as a member of the editorial boards of the following scientific journals:

• Emerging Microbes and Infections[6]
• Systems and Synthetic Biology[7]
• Infectious Agents and Cancer[8]
• Annals of Clinical Microbiology and Antimicrobials[9]
• F1000 Research[10]
• Microbial Genomics (MGEN)[11]
• Scientific Reports[12]

Ahmed teaches courses in Molecular Biology (laboratory), Metagenomics, Biosafety and Intellectual Property, Research Ethics and Management and Comparative Systems Modeling. His research interests include genomics, evolution and molecular pathogenesis of the two co-evolved human pathogens, namely, Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Helicobacter pylori, in the context of evolution of adaptation mechanisms, and acquisition and optimization of virulence during colonization/infection. Ahmed also has interest in comparative genomics of bacterial pathogens obtained from single patients at different occasions and this approach nurtures his concept of 'chronological evolution and replicative genomics' as tools to study host-microbe interaction over time. Ahmed's group has developed a widely used multilocus sequence typing scheme for species level identification of pathogenic Leptospira with a potential to replace the highly ambiguous serotyping method that currently is used for Leptospiral strain identification.[13] Ahmed has also worked extensively on the nomenclature, taxonomic status, genome sequencing and functional characterization of Mycobacterium indicus pranii,[14] a non-pathogenic mycobacterial species with very high translational promise as an immunotherapeutic.

• Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize, India's highest science award - 2016
• National Bioscience Award for Career Development - 2011
• University of Hyderabad Chancellor's Award - 2015

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