I come from the village 192 RB Rasool Nagar in the outskirts of Faisalabad, Pakistan and received my Doctor of Veterinary Medicine and MPhil in Microbiology degrees from the University of Agriculture, Faisalabad. From my early school years, I was interested in the origin and evolution of life which continued as self-argumentation during my undergraduate studies. With aims to study ‘Evolution on Petri Plate’ and to get insights into evolution and dissemination of genes, I chose to study antimicrobial use (AMU) and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) during my postgraduate. Concentrated animal farming operations are the major disposal points of antimicrobials and are the hotspots for the selection and dissemination of resistance genes, making them ideal systems to study evolution. During 2020-22 I worked under Fleming Fund Country Grant I & II as AMU consultant and held AMU point prevalence surveys in different food animal sectors in Pakistan. In 2022 I joined IOI-AMR as a DPhil in Biology student, funded by PEEF-CMMS Government of Punjab, Pakistan, under the supervision of Prof. Tim R Walsh. My DPhil studies focus on i) molecular epidemiology of antimicrobial resistance in food animals in Pakistan ii) in vivo bacterial acquisition of resistance genes in response to evolutionary pressure and their fitness cost on pathogenicity and survivability.
