Muhammad Arif Sajjad

Dr. Muhmmad Sajjad is working as 'Tenured Associate professor' in the Department of Bioscience, COMSATS University Islamabad, Pakistan. His research interests converge on to bridging the gap between genome and phenome in cereals using latest genetics, genomics and genome editing tools. He got his PhD from University of Agriculture Faisalabad with international fellowship at ARS-USDA, California. He did his postdoctoral fellowship from the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology (IGDB), CAS. He has discovered some new yield related genes in bread wheat and devolped their easy to use markers for marker assisted selection (MAS) in wheat. He has developed a novel protocol for discovering/haplotyping multiple genes in a large collection of accessions in hexaploid wheat that was filed for Patent in Beijing. He has published >60 research articles in SCI journals. He is a memeber of breeders teams which are developing new wheat and rice varieties. In 2019, his rice breeding group submitted an early maturing, high yielding and better quality candidate rice variety "IAGS-PU-1" to the 'Variety Evaluation Committee (VEC)' for approval of its commercial cultivation. Currently, he is running two projects on wheat genetics and genomics, one as PI and one as CoPI. He has produced one PhD on rice breeding and genetics. Currently, he is supervising 4 MS students and 2 PhD students. Thus far, he has taught 17 different undergraduate and graduate courses with average teaching score of > 90%.