Dr. Amir Faisal received his PhD in Cell Biology from Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research/University of Basel, Switzerland in 2004. During his PhD he identified novel roles for Shc protein, an important adaptor downstream of tyrosine kinases, in insulin signaling and cytoskeletal reorganization. He received his first postdoctoral training (2004-2008) in Protein Phosphorylation Laboratory at London Research Institute where he discovered that another adaptor protein, MyD88, couples Protein Kinase C epsilon to Toll like receptors during innate immunity. From 2008 to 2014, he worked at Cancer Therapeutics Unit of Institute of Cancer Research in Sutton first as postdoctoral fellow and later as senior scientist. He played an important role in progression of several drug discovery projects, one of which resulted in discovery of a pre-clinical development candidate that will undergo phase I clinical trials in 2016. After joining LUMS in August 2014, he has been establishing a cancer therapeutics lab at SBASSE.

Learn more at: http://biolabs.lums.edu.pk/cancer 

Dr. Malik is a Senior Scientist at the biopharmaceutical company, AbbVie, where she works on drug discovery from a multi-omics perspective for neuropsychiatric disorders. She graduated from LUMS in 2013 with a BS in Computer Science and continued to pursue a PhD from Stony Brook University, with a focus on the development of computational algorithms for sequencing data analysis. She has published several papers at renowned bioinformatics venues.

Dr. Munawar is an Assistant Research Scientist at the Lab for Computational Sensing and Robotics (LCSR) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU). He received his Ph.D. and M.S. from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) while working at the Automation in Interventional Medicine (AIM) Laboratory. He was the recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship during his M.S. program. His research interests broadly include medical robotics, haptics and force control, simulation and animation, and digital twins.
 

Dr. Muhammad Furqan Afzal recently completed his PhD in Computational Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in the USA, where he focused on the intersection of neuroscience and AI, and developed AI tools for extracting insights from brain activity data. He holds a Master of Science degree in Computational Neuroscience from the University of Cincinnati, and obtained his Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from LUMS SSE in 2014. Dr. Afzal has also worked as a Research Scientist at Stanford University, where he utilized AI and signal processing techniques to identify neural biomarkers associated with symptoms in Parkinson's disease. He has also gained experience in neurotech companies and startups, contributing to the development of AI-based tools for brain-computer interfaces (BCI). His research interests encompass various areas including neuroscience, artificial intelligence and its applications in healthcare.

Dr. Muhammad Shoaib is an Associate Professor in the Department of Life Sciences at SBASSE, LUMS. A clinician-turned-researcher, Dr. Shoaib exudes a passion for teaching and research in chromatin biology and proteomics. He co-teaches the course, BIO 403: Critical Thinking, Scientific Writing and Ethics, where he aims to enable students to think critically and use these skills for project designing.

Dr Constance Cepko is Bullard Professor of Genetics and Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. She trained in virology with Phil Sharp at MIT for a Ph.D. and later with Richard Mulligan at the MIT Whitehead Institute. She helped develop retroviral vectors for transduction into the nervous system for lineage analysis and for studies of gene function in vivo. Her laboratory has focused on the topic of cell fate determination in the retina through the analysis of the behavior of progenitor and stem cells. More recently, they have been studying the mechanisms of photoreceptor death in diseases that cause blindness, such as retinitus pigmentosa and macular degeneration. Furthermore, her lab develops new tools for genetic perturbations using nanobodies, and is developing VSV as a transsynaptic virus for mapping synaptic connections among neurons. (https://hsci.harvard.edu/people/constance-cepko-phd)

In order to thrive in an increasingly competitive milieu, it is critical for students conducting scientific research to communicate their ideas and findings effectively to their peers, supervisors, and the wider scientific community. Writing is one of the primary modes of communication in science; therefore, this workshop is designed to provide an overview of the essential elements of scientific writing. It will cover the dos and don’ts of scientific writing, and the basics of writing the different components of scientific papers. Alongside these writing skills, students will be exposed to the ecosystem of scientific publishing to elevate their understanding of how the writing and publishing processes are integrated. 

Biography

Professor Sir Aziz Sheikh is Director of the Usher Institute at University of Edinburgh.  He is also Dean of Data for The University of Edinburgh, Director of the Asthma UK Centre for Applied Research (AUKCAR), Director of the Scottish Allergy and Respiratory Academy (SARA), and Co-Director of the NHS Digital Academy Digital Health Leadership Programme. Sir Aziz holds a number of visiting chairs, including University of Birmingham (UK), Queen Mary’s University of London (UK) and Maastricht University (Netherlands).  He was previously Visiting Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

He is an editorial board member of BMC Medicine, Health Informatics Journal, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Medical Care and PLOS Medicine, and is Editor-in-Chief of npj: Primary Care Respiratory Medicine. 
Sir Aziz was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for Services to Medicine and Health Care by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in 2014, and received knighthood for services to COVID-19 research and policy in 2022.
 

Dr Fred Winston is the John Emory Andrus Professor in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. He is recognized for his work on gene expression in yeast. He is known particularly for his identification and studies of yeast SPT genes, which encode conserved factors that control eukaryotic transcription and chromatin structure. Dr Winston was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1952. He grew up in Cleveland, graduated from the University of Chicago in 1974 with a degree in biology, and received a doctorate from MIT in 1980. Dr Winston did his PhD with David Botstein and then was a postdoc with Gerry Fink at Cornell and MIT. Dr Winston joined the faculty in the new Department of Genetics at Harvard Med in 1983. Dr Winston was president of the Genetics Society of America in 2009.

Dr Winston's laboratory is interested in the regulation of transcription and chromatin structure. By genetic approaches, they have identified several conserved factors that play critical roles throughout eukaryotes. By genomic approaches, they have shown that these factors globally control the accuracy of transcription initiation and the integrity of chromatin structure. Current research focuses on a class of factors called histone chaperones that control transcription, DNA replication, and genome stability. 

After a PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology at Brandeis University, Monica Colaiácovo joined Dr. Anne Villeneuve’s laboratory at Stanford University as a postdoctoral fellow. Colaiácovo is currently a Professor in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School researching the mechanisms that promote accurate chromosome segregation during meiosis and that are therefore essential for reproductive health. Studies on checkpoint mechanisms regulating meiotic progression in the Colaiácovo lab were supported by the Armenise Harvard Junior Faculty Grant in 2008-2010.