Founding Director, cBLAST

Zeba I. Seraj has been teaching in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh since 1988. Her research experience is in molecular biology and genetics. Specifically in stress biology of plants. Her Ph.D. and Post Doctorate were from the Universities of Glasgow and Liverpool. She has published more than 50 research articles in well reputed peer-reviewed journals mostly on abiotic stress tolerance in rice.

Zeba has collaborations with Bangladesh Rice Research Institute (BRRI), International Rice research Institute and (IRRI) University of Nebraska at Lincoln (UNL) and University of Texas at Austin (UT, Austin). During the course of her collaborative work on next generation sequencing (NGS) technologies to decipher the salt tolerance mechanism of rice landraces, she realized the urgent need for training in Bioinformatics for a whole generation of students. A large trained manpower in Bioinformatics is necessary to comprehend the complexities of stress tolerance embedded in the terrabytes of data from genome sequences. Moreover, bioinformatics has application not only helping in producing crops resilient to climate change but also in disease identification and treatment as well as drug design.

Bioinformatics is however a multidisciplinary subject where expertise in biology, computing science as well as statistics is required. Together with a group of scientists like Khademul Islam of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (GEBDU), and her own researchers, Taslima Haque and Sabrina M. Elias, Zeba thought that the best way forward would be to prepare an appropriate syllabus and gather experts from different disciplines to ask them to design courses for online dissemination which would be open to all in different Universities and Research institutes in Bangladesh. The University authorities agreed to open a Center for such bioinformatics learning and cBLAST or Center for Bioinformatics Learning Advancement and Systematics Training at Dhaka University was born. Many of our ideas were influenced by the online course system, Coursera, and Computer Scientists from the Bio-Bio-1 Foundation, Fokhruz Zaman, Saddam Hossain and Zahirul H. Tiemoon.