Sobia Ahsan Halim

About

Dr. Sobia Ahsan Halim is currently serving as an Associate Professor at Natural and Medical Sciences Research Center (NMSRC), University of Nizwa, Sultanate of Oman. Her laboratory at NMSRC, focuses on the classification of structural data pertaining to protein-ligand complexes, identification of macromolecular targets, and drug discovery approaches to specific disease areas. This lab is the first lab in Oman which particularly focus on Computer Aided Drug Designing of diseases originated in Oman and the rest of the world.
Dr. Halim has expertise in Structure-based virtual screening, ligand-based drug design, molecular docking, pharmacophore modeling, quantitative structure activity relationship analysis, molecular similarity analysis, generation and screening of virtual molecular libraries, homology modeling, molecular dynamic simulations, and fragment-based drug designing.
Previously Dr. Halim has worked at the Department of Biochemistry, Kinnaird College for Women, Lahore (2015 to 2018), and in National Centre of Excellence in Molecular Biology, University of the Punjab, Lahore-Pakistan, from 2013 to 2015.
She holds a Ph.D. in Computational Medicinal Chemistry from Dr. Panjwani Center for Molecular Medicine and Drug Research, International Center for Chemical and Biological Sciences, University of Karachi, Karachi-Pakistan. During Ph.D., she focused on the identification of novel inhibitors for Interleukin-II. Her PhD topic was “Modeling Aided Lead Design of Cytokines Inhibitors”. During PhD, she received Split PhD scholarship from Higher Education Commission Pakistan under “International Research Support Initiative Program” and went to carry out a research mobility in School of Pharmacy, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Illinois-USA. There she carried out research project entitled “A Structure Guided Fragment Library through Massive Screening of Chemogenomics” under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Maria Kontoyianni. The research involved target specific generation of fragments libraries which enabled her to learn Computational fragment-based drug designing techniques. In 2012, she received scholarship from Brazilian Agriculture Research Corporation (ESPCA) to attend the course of “Computational Biology-Agrochemical and Drug Design” held in Sao Paulo School of Advanced Sciences (ESPCA), Campinas, Brazil (April 1-6, 2012). She won the Best poster award titled “The Role of Computer-Aided Drug Design in the identification of Cytokines Inhibitors” among hundred participants of over forty countries. This course helped her to understand the role of Computational Biology in Agriculture.
Dr. Halim received M.Sc (Hons) and B.Sc (Hons) in Biochemistry from Jinnah University for Women Karachi, Pakistan. She secured first position in the Department of Biochemistry, J.U.W. in B.Sc as well as in M.Sc. During M.Sc she did thesis project entitled “Different Docking Approached to Explore Protein-Ligand Interactions” in Biophysics and learned docking techniques which developed her interest in Computational Drug Designing.

Employment

• University of Nizwa Assistant Professor
  2018 - Present

Education

Education history is unavailable.

Projects & Funding

Projects & funding information is unavailable.

Publications

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