Naveen Kumar DR has completed his doctoral course in cell/cancer biology at VIT University, Vellore in October 2013 and started his professional career in January 2014 by joining the Department of Clinical Microbiology, Christian Medical College, Vellore as a Scientist-C, ICMR Ad-hoc in a project funded by the Indian Council of Medical Research, India. Then, he joined The University of Sheffield, UK in 2019 as a Global Challenges Research Fellow funded by TUoS and GCRF, UK to work on biofilm-mediated clinical infections for two years. With his experience in his career till date, Naveen has ideologised the concept of Bioberry’s to bring in class-leading diagnostics and patient care at a simpler level under one roof.
He was operational as a Technical Editor in the Indian Journal of Medical Microbiology for 4 years (2016-2019). He also served as Associate and Academic Editor for reputed journals including Frontiers and PLOS ONE. He is a WHONET (antimicrobial resistance surveillance platform) trainer, World Health Organisation (WHO) for the last 4 years, trained by Dr. John Stelling, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
His area of interest includes studying the antimicrobial resistance mechanisms and monitoring the AMR secular trend in India. He is involved in projects analysing and understanding resistance mechanisms and molecular epidemiology. Also involved in analysing the pattern of spread of resistance through plasmids and other mobile genetic elements. His current research is in bacteriophages to remediate AMR bugs, especially biofilm-forming ones.
He is experienced in performing multiple next-generation sequencing techniques, and advanced phylogenetic and evolutionary bio-informatic analysis. He is professionally trained in the Illumina Mi-Seq platform at the National Institute of Infectious Diseases, Tokyo, Japan, and Oxford Nanopore sequencing at Genotypic Solutions, Bangalore, India. Also, he is trained in advanced bioinformatics analysis of next-generation sequences by the PATRIC-RAST team from the National Institute of Health, USA. In addition, he had been trained in RMPRU, Witwatersrand University, South Africa on culture identification and molecular diagnostics of group B Streptococcus.
In this capacity, he has contributed by providing scientific invited and keynote lectures at several international Conferences and scientific gatherings. He has published >70 research articles and several conference proceedings. He has authored >200 genes and genome sequences in NCBI.
He has received ISSAD travel scholarship award from Bill and Melinda Gates foundation for Cape Town, South Africa, 2018, and Award for Young Investigator from India and Southeast Asia, from Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 2016. Recently received a Global challenges Research Fellowship funded by The University of Sheffield and UK Research and Innovation, UK. He is the Founder and UK lead for the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) sponsored networking consortium “Biofilms and Antimicrobial Resistance Consortium of ODA receiving countries – (BARCOD)”.
He has also contributed to various national and international workshops on AMR in association with WHO India and WHO-SEARO as a consultant. He has trained and guided several post-graduate students in molecular techniques on AMR and has helped colleagues to solve any research-related problems and queries.