Dr. Mohammad Tanbir Habib is a bioinformatician, with keen interest in infectious disease. He joined the institute for developing Science and Health initiatives (ideSHi) in August 2022 as a Global Health Fellow. Dr. Habib leads the ideSHi genomics team and is engaged in Bangladesh’s nationwide genomic surveillance program for SARS-CoV-2. The team is routinely sequencing SARS-CoV-2 and Dengue genomes to identify new or circulating lineages within the country. In addition to his work on viral genomics, Dr. Habib is also interested in understanding the emergence and spread of antimicrobial genes in prokaryotic pathogens. He uses metagenomics to explore microbial diversity and applies comparative genomics to reveal genetic patterns associated with the fitness of pathogenic microorganisms. Driven by our social responsibilities, the ideSHi genomics team also provides targeted amplicon-sequencing services to identify actionable mutations for precision medicine. 

Dr. Habib earned his Doctor of Natural Science (Dr. rer. nat.) degree from the Institute for Population Genetics at Heinrich-Heine University in Duesseldorf, Germany. He also spent six months as a visiting researcher at the Michigan State University, USA. Prior to his doctoral studies, he completed his M.Sc. at the Justus-Liebig University of Giessen, Germany, and trained as an intern at the Max-Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology, Marburg, Germany. He has also worked as a research assistant at the Georg-August University of Goettingen, Germany. He completed his bachelor’s degree in 2007 from the Department of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, University of Rajshahi, Bangladesh. Throughout his scientific career, Dr. Habib has been focusing on the genetic basis of diversity and specificity in organismic interactions.