Recognizing Plant Physiology authors: Firoz Ahmed
Firoz Ahmed, first author of pssRNAit-a web server for designing effective and specific plant siRNAs with genome-wide off-target assessment
Current Position: Assistant Professor, Department of Biochemistry, University of Jeddah, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
Education: Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India; M.Sc. in Biotechnology from Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, India; B.Sc. (Hons) in Biotechnology from Patna University, Patna, India
Non-scientific Interests: reading, spending time with family, traveling, running, painting
Brief bio: Fuelled by the desire to contribute to human life welfare, I joined Dr. GPS Raghava lab at the Institute of Microbial Technology, Chandigarh, where my Ph.D. research focused on understanding the RNA interference mechanism in gene regulation using bioinformatics and machine learning techniques. After that, as a Postdoctoral Research Associate, I joined Dr. Patrick X. Zhao lab at Noble Research Institute, where I further studied the roles of miRNAs/siRNAs in gene regulation using high-throughput sequencing data and developed a computational method for designing siRNAs for post-transcriptional gene silencing in plants. Afterward, I joined Dr. Kristin Gunsalus lab at Center for Genomics and Systems Biology, New York University, where my work focused on the mechanistic understanding of the developmental process in C. elegans using high-throughput functional genomics and systems biology approaches.
Currently, our lab uses the integrative network analysis of multi-omics data and artificial intelligence to understand the molecular mechanisms underlying complex human diseases and to discover disease-related biomarkers and potential targets.
