Shahzad Ahmad

Shahzad Ahmad joined IMCM core data team as Senior Human Geneticist in 2022. He read for an undergraduate degree in microbiology from Government College University, Lahore, Pakistan. He was awarded a foreign scholarship to study Master in Life Science Informatics at the Bonn-Aachen International Centre for information technology, Bonn, Germany. He obtained his second master’s degree as a part of the MSc-PhD program in Genetic Epidemiology at the Erasmus University Medical Centre, Rotterdam, Netherlands. In August 2019, he started working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research (LACDR), and afterward continued his research as a joint postdoctoral researcher at Erasmus Medical Centre, Rotterdam and the LACDR, Leiden until November 2022. During his postdoc, he led a meta-analysis of genome-wide association study of neurofilament light (NfL) in the CHARGE consortium, and investigated the role of gut-microbiome, genome and exposome in driving blood levels of metabolites and their relationship with general cognition.

Over the last decade, Shahzad participated in multiple international consortia including the Innovative Medicine Initiative (IMI) ADAPTED program, Alzheimer’s disease sequencing project (ADSP), the Cohorts for Heart and Aging Research in Genomic Epidemiology (CHARGE), the International Genomics of Alzheimer’s Project (IGAP), and the Alzheimer’s Disease Metabolomics Consortium (ADMC).

More broadly, his research interests include Genetic Epidemiology, Metabolomics, Proteomics, cross-omics integration, Alzheimer's disease, and neurodegenerative diseases. He is passionate about translational research, and his current work focuses on the integration of multi-omics data for patient risk stratification, the discovery of new drug targets and biomarkers for neurodegenerative diseases