The Department of Pharmacy, BRAC University organized a seminar, titled ‘Informatics in Target-based Drug Discovery’ on December 8, 2016 at the Department of Pharmacy, BRAC University. It was conducted by Dr. Rasheduzzaman Chowdhury, Research Scientist, University of Oxford, United Kingdom. The seminar was organized to introduce the students to the prospect of informatics in target-based drug discovery.
Informatics deals with the science of information and computer information systems. It is an academic field that involves the interaction between humans and information alongside the construction of interfaces, organisations, technologies and systems.
The keynote speaker, Dr. Chowdhury started his academic career as a Lecturer at the Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Dhaka and later obtained his PhD in 2008 with Commonwealth Open Scholarship from the University of Oxford in Structural Biology of pharmaceutically important protein targets and complexes involved in oxygen-sensitive transcriptions. He obtained Vice-Chancellor’s Award from the University of Oxford for his exceptional research activities. In his post-doctorate, Dr. Chowdhury investigated the structural basis of enzyme-catalysed demethylations that led to generation of new tools for epigenetic research and initiated work on the ribosomal oxygenases involved in protein translation.
Dr. Chowdhury is a member of many professional organisations including Royal Society of Chemistry, American Chemical Society and American Crystallographic Association. He is the author as well as the reviewer of many well-reputed journals including those published by Nature, National Academy of Sciences, American Chemical Society and many more.
He is currently working as a Research Scientist at the University of Oxford, where he carries out independent research in biotechnology and structural biology of large physiologically relevant complexes with a general aim for drug discovery and development.