MA

Mohammad Faraz Alam

National Institutes of Health, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Institute of Life Sciences, University of Hyderabad, Cactus Communications Pvt Ltd, Jamia Millia Islamia

ORCID iD 0000-0002-6996-2991
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About

I am a versatile and enthusiastic research scholar with an inherent penchant for unraveling the mysteries of biological sciences. I aspire to be a part of an elite group/organization and work in the field of research and development to benefit the scientific community and make the world a safer and better place to live in.

I started my academic voyage with a bachelor's degree in Biosciences followed by a master’s degree in Biotechnology and landed a Ph.D. in the field of Host-Virus Interactions at the Department of Infectious Disease Biology, Institute of Life Sciences. Our lab research specialized in Flaviviruses with my work primarily focused on the Japanese Encephalitis Virus (JEV).

During my Ph.D. tenure, I worked on determining the impact of JEV on mitochondria-centric events and deciphering the significance of these events in the lifecycle of the virus. For this, I looked at the effect of JEV infection on aspects like mitochondrial health, function, dynamics, and quality control mechanisms. To comprehensively understand the behavior of the virus in different susceptible cells/tissues, I have performed experiments on the human neuroblastoma and human hepatoma cell lines in parallel with challenging the mice with JEV infection and subjecting the brain and liver tissue for further analysis to validate our in vitro findings. I have also determined JEV-triggered cell death pathways in the mentioned cell lines and tissues. To determine the role of individual viral proteins in the perturbed quality control system, I also looked at the interactions of the virus proteins with that of the host mitochondrial proteins and interestingly found one of them to be involved in perturbing mitochondrial quality control system. Lastly, I also determined the role played by the mitochondrial dynamics proteins, Mfn2 and DRP1, along with the mitophagy protein, PINK1 in the JEV lifecycle by subjecting the cells to siRNA-mediated knockdown and looking at the concomitant effect on the JEV copy number and the antiviral response.

In the future, I look forward to working on other viruses and their interactions with the host, further exploring novel techniques in the field, and expanding my niche of expertise to become a good virologist to serve society.

Employment

  • National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Visiting Fellow
    2024 - Present
  • All India Institute of Medical Sciences Project Scientist-1
    2023 - 2024
  • Cactus Communications Pvt Ltd Editor
    2023 - 2023

Education

  • Institute of Life Sciences Ph. D.
    2017 - 2023
  • University of Hyderabad Master of Science
    2014 - 2016
  • Jamia Millia Islamia Bachelor of Science
    2010 - 2013

Projects & Funding

Projects & funding information is unavailable.

Publications (4)