Dr. Zeyaul Islam completed his Master’s (2006) from Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) India, and worked on protein folding problem where he exploited biophysical techniques to understand the stages/intermediates during protein folding. On completion, he joined the protein crystallography lab under the supervision of Dr. Subramanian Karthikeyan at the Institute of Microbial Technology for his doctrate. During this period he worked on understanding the structure-function relationship of the enzymes of Riboflavin/FAD biosynthesis pathway from Vibrio cholerae and used it as a template for structure-based drug designing for the development of specific drugs (completed in 2012). As a postdoctoral researcher he had the opportunity to combine his MSc and PhD experiences; he worked on molecular chaperones (proteins that assist in protein folding) in IISER, Bhopal, India. He has worked on various aspect of co-chaperone Hsp40s and their cellular role in Hsp70/Hsp40 network using protein biochemistry and structural biology approaches.

Dr. Islam secured the FAPESP postdoctoral fellowship in 2015 and worked with Dr. Andre LB Ambrosio, LNBio, CNPEM, Brazil. His project was titled, “Biophysical and biochemical studies of the human glutaminases (important in cancer metabolism) in complex with novel binding partners”. He also explored supratetrameic form (filamentous) of glutaminases by cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). He was also involved in human membrane protein characterization especially mitochondrial pyruvate carriers. He joined QBRI as a Postdoctoral Researcher in March, 2018.