Dinesh Mondal

Since 2001 I have been working for improving health of the people who are affected and at risk for Neglected Tropical Diseases, enteric infection, respiratory disease in particular Tuberculosis and malnutrition. Since 2020 I have expanded my activities in the field of AMR too. During this time, I have succeeded in building well-trained teams for basic, clinical, diagnostic, vector-ecology, operational research and genome sequencing for pathogenic bacteria. I served icddr,b as an Acting Senior Director of its Laboratory Sciences and Services Division for the period March 2020 to January 2023. During my tenure I contributed to revitalization of the icddr,b Genome Centre. With the support from Stage 1 NIHR Grant, UK through London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine we successfully build up the infrastructure and trained human resources in the icddr,b Genome Centre for DNA and RNA Sequencing, High throughput and Long read sequencing using Illumina Next-Generation and Oxford Nanopore sequencing platforms. Thanks to this, icddr,b very successfully contributed to the national surveillance for COVID-19 genomics epidemiology during the pandemic. In parallel I am trying to take this technology and congregated experience to the field of TB research to support the National TB Program in Bangladesh. Bangladesh is one of the highest TB burden countries globally. The National Tuberculosis Program is implementing very successfully all the strategies for controlling TB in the country, but genomics based clinical management and surveillance of TB currently is not there. For this the NTP needs support to build up genomics platform in its national laboratory which will help the NTP to manage properly thousands of cases with MDR-/XDR-TB in Bangladesh.