Abed Chaudhury’s take on advancing agriculture with biotechnology

On 6th June BRAC University Biotechnology program (MNS) in cooperation with BRAC University Society for Biotechnology (BUSB) hosted a seminar on climate-advanced agricultural biotechnology at the lecture theatre hall of Brac University. The guest speaker was Dr. Abed Chaudhury, geneticist, co-founder & scientific advisor of Genofax. The event was attended by the esteemed faculties and enthusiastic students.

The topic of the seminar was “Abed Choudhary: A multi-decade journey in science covering Food, Climate & Genofax”. Abed Chaudhury, the co-founder of Genofax, has projects in both Bangladesh and Australia that are focused on developing individualised medicine based on gut microbiome using AI. He is currently working at Soil Company with crop breeding. Previously, he has done research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. He gave students of BRAC University the opportunity to interview for research roles at Genofax. He discussed his most revolutionary development, the “Panchabrihi” strain of rice which he cultivated in Sylhet. This strain only needs to be planted once to be harvested five times. He expressed his interest in innovating more genetically modified crops with various purposes such as extending shelf life and maintaining low blood glucose. The seminar ended with an interactive engagement between the speaker and the audience. Alfa Islam (Sophomore, MNS) expressed her opinion on the session, “The event was impactful as it created an opportunity to connect to such an amazing scientist where the interaction was direct and we could easily get our queries answered”. She mentioned having a profound realisation about the impact biotechnology can have on food deficiencies in the future, and how they might be solved. The audience were left with Abed Chaudhury’s vision of a world with personalised medicine and holistic developments in biotechnology from this seminar.