Muhammad Sarwar Khan
Muhammad Sarwar Khan is currently serving as Professor and Director at the Center of Agricultural Biochemistry and Biotechnology (CABB), University of Agriculture, Faisalabad, Pakistan. He has earned his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, UK. Afterward, he was awarded the Rockefeller foundation fellowship under the Rice Biotechnology Program for Developing Countries to carry out research at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology, Rutgers, USA. His first of its kind research was published in Nature Biotechnology. Dr. Khan has served as the founding group leader of Chloroplast Transformation and Biopharming, and as the head of Biotech Interdisciplinary Division at NIBGE. Dr. Khan has supervised more than 100 Ph.D., M-Phil students, and researchers. He has published 105 articles in high impact journals, including Nature, and he is the author of several book chapters and books. Dr. Khan has developed transgenic sugarcane, resistant to top borers and tolerant to a herbicide, which was approved by the National Biosafety Committee (NBC) for field trials in 2006–2007. This was the first proposal of endogenously developed transgenic crops, approved by the NBC in Pakistan. Dr. Khan has also pioneered plastid transformation in rice and sugarcane, recalcitrant plant species. He has also knocked out a number of genes from the chloroplast genome of higher plants. His current research interests include the development of edible-marker-carrying transgenics, cost-effective therapeutics and edible vaccines for animals. Dr. Khan has received prestigious national and international awards and is on the Editorial Boards of international scientific journals.