Shahid Mukhtar, a faculty candidate for the Systems Biology position within the Biology Department, will present a seminar titled "Making the Right Connections: How to Get the Edge in Systems Biology" noon Friday, March 1, in 141 Starcher Hall.

Shahid Mukhtar received his doctoral degree in Plant Microbe Interactions/Genetics from Max-Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, Cologne, Germany, under the supervision of Imre Somssich in 2005. He continued his post-doctoral research in the laboratory of Jeff Dangl, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 2006-2010, where he employed genomics, bioinformatics and computer-aided systems-level analyses to generate the first large-scale Arabidopsis-pathogens protein-protein interaction network in collaboration with the Dana Farber Cancer Institute & Center for Cancer Systems Biology, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Mass. Mukhtar is currently working as a research assistant professor (non-tenure track) at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Department of Biology, where he is pursuing research in plant-microbe interactions using systems biology, genomics and bioinformatics approaches on the following three avenues:

1) generation of comprehensive plant-immune network using versatile pathogens
2) construction of large-scale transcriptional regulatory network
3) pathogen-mediated network perturbation both at protein-protein and protein-DNA levels.