Dr. Aftab Ahmed

Dr. Aftab Ahmed earned his Ph.D. in protein chemistry from HEJ Research Institute of Chemistry, University of Karachi, Pakistan, in 1989. He completed a part of his Ph.D. thesis at the Department of Protein Chemistry, Max-Plank Institute of Biochemistry, Munich, Germany. After graduation, he rejoined the Max-Planck Institute in 1988 as a postdoctoral fellow and continued his research work on the primary structure of Carnivore hemoglobin. He joined the National Cancer Institute (NCI), Frederick, Maryland, as a postdoctoral fellow in 1989 and worked on the characterization of retroviral proteins from HTLV-1 and BLV retroviruses. He joined as a postgraduate researcher to work on the characterization of human fibrinogen at the University of California Irvine in 1992 and later established a Biomedical Sequencing and Synthesis Core Facility.

He also worked on peptide synthesis at Harbor UCLA Medical Center. Ahmed also has industrial experience, working in biotechnology companies. He joined as a protein chemist at CytoTherapeutics Inc., Lincoln, Rhode Island, in 1996. Later, he joined as a staff scientist in biochemistry R&D at a tissue engineering company, Organogenesis Inc., Canton, Massachusetts, in 1998. Ahmed moved to academia, joined as a Coordinator, and established a multi-million dollar Centralized Research Core Facility at the University of Rhode Island (URI) in June 2003, supported through the IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence Program, NIH. He became a Research Assistant professor at URI in May 2008 and was involved in teaching graduate and undergraduate courses at URI.

He joined Chapman University School of Pharmacy in 2015 as a Research Associate Professor and Manager of the CUSP Analytical Core Facility, Department of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences. He is an adjunct faculty member at the International Center for Chemical and Biological Sciences (ICCBS), University of Karachi, Pakistan. He is conducting research projects on bioactive proteins and peptides from medicinal plants used as traditional and complementary medicine. Dr. Ahmed has authored 45+ peer-reviewed publications and 40+ meeting abstracts.

Research Interests

Dr. Ahmed’s current research interests are profiling proteins and peptides in medicinal plants. He employs protein purification, characterization, and amino acid sequencing techniques, such as FPLC/HPLC, mass spectrometry, and N-terminal protein sequencing.