An accomplished microbiologist/virologist, with graduate degrees from University of Karachi, Pakistan, followed by advanced training at various academic centers in the US. Also possess nineteen years of bench experience at multiple clinical and diagnostic laboratories in Karachi. Appointed in 1997 as a tenure track faculty member in the Microbiology Department of Jinnah University for Women (JUW). Currently, serving as Chairperson and Associate Professor in the same Department. In order to keep my education and skills current and relevant, have taken appropriate courses and workshops, and also participated in professional conferences/ symposia. I have had numerous collaborative research activities, including University of Iowa Medical School, University of Minnesota-Duluth, University of Wisconsin Madison, and Claflin University, SC. My research has resulted in 20 publications and 43 abstracts, with the central focus now being on virology. I have presented my data during the 2003/04/05/06/08 and 09 ASM’s International general meetings, at IVI-Korea and at 25th annual Clinical Virology Symposium in 2009. I have spend time training at Dr. Robert Striker’s Lab at Medical School, University of Wisconsin, Madison as visiting scholar and at Dr Raj Karim’s Lab. at University of Minnesota, Duluth as visiting professor where I worked for the drug protocol against HCV using Bovine Viral Diarrhea virus as surrogate model. At South Carolina Center for Biotechnology, Claflin University, I continued the same research along with the genotyping and gene sequencing of HBV and HCV viruses, to assess the prevalence and distribution of these viruses in Pakistan. I also worked to search the homologous sequences of primate microRNAs in Lentiviruses, retroelements and human endogenous retroviruses.
