Fungal Biotechnology: Advancements in Drug Discovery, Healthcare, and Environmental Solutions

Dr. Arshad Farid is serving as an assistant professor at the Gomal Center of Biochemistry and Biotechnology, Gomal University, D.I. Khan, Pakistan. He has approximately 17 years of teaching and research experience. He has supervised 13 MPhil research students and is mentoring several PhD candidates. He has more than 100 publications of international and national repute. His scientific activities are highly interdisciplinary, spanning medicinal plants, natural product chemistry, herbal drug development, ethnopharmacology, nanotechnology, drug delivery, and microbiology. He has served as editor for five books and authored over 50 book chapters. He holds 27 international patents (Germany, UK, South Africa, Japan, etc.) and has published over 15 abstracts in national and international conference proceedings. In 2023, Dr. Arshad was a fellow of the British Council Charles Wallace Fellowship program at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK. He previously received a fellowship for "Training in Environmental, Agricultural, and Analytical Chemistry Laboratory Techniques" from the Department of Chemistry, University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK, in 2007.

Dr. Gagan Preet has been serving as a teaching research fellow at the Marine Biodiscovery Research Centre, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK, since 2019. He is an expert in marine natural product research, with a strong background in chemistry and specialized expertise in computational chemistry for drug design and discovery. He collaborates with institutions such as the Natural History Museum, the National Oceanography Centre, and the University of the South Pacific on the DEFRA, UK-funded project, DEEPEND. This project aims to understand the impacts of climate change and seabed mining on the ecology, microbiology, and chemistry of deep-sea biodiversity. Dr. Preet’s research focuses on discovering new molecules to target the dengue virus (a neglected tropical disease), mucormycosis, and type 2 diabetes using computational and chemoinformatics approaches. He collaborates with other scientific laboratories to perform in vitro tests on the identified leads.