Khalid Zaffar Masoodi Editor

Rouf Ahmad Bhat, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at Cluster University, Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India, specializing in limnology, toxicology, phytochemistry, and phytoremediation. Dr. Bhat has been teaching graduate and postgraduate students of environmental sciences for the past three years. He is an author of more than 53 research papers and 35 book chapters and has published more than 20 books with international publishers. He has presented and participated in numerous state, national, and international conferences, seminars, workshops, and symposiums. Dr. Bhat has worked as an Associate Environmental Expert in a World Bank-funded flood recovery project and also environmental support staff in several Asian Development Bank (ADB)-funded development projects. He has received many awards, appreciations, and recognitions for his services to the science of water testing and air and noise analysis. He has served as an editorial board member and reviewer for several international journals published by Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor and Francis, SAGE and Wiley. Dr. Bhat continues to write and experiment diverse capacities of plants for use in aquatic pollution.

Moonisa Aslam Dervash, PhD, is actively involved in teaching graduate and postgraduate students of environmental at Sri Pratap College Campus, Cluster University Srinagar, J&K, India. She has received a number of awards and certificates of merit. Her specialization is in mesofuana and carbon sequestration. She has published scores of papers in international journals and has more than three books with national and international publishers. She is also a reviewer of various international journals.

Khalid Rehman Hakeem, PhD, is Professor at King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. After completing his doctorate (botany; specialization in plant eco-physiology and molecular biology) from Jamia Hamdard, New Delhi, India, he worked as a lecturer at the University of Kashmir, Srinagar, India, at Universiti Putra Malaysia, Selangor, Malaysia, he was a Postdoctorate Fellow and Fellow Researcher (Associate Professor) for several years. Dr. Hakeem has more than 10 years of teaching and research experience in plant eco-physiology, biotechnology and molecular biology, medicinal plant research, plant-microbe-soil interactions, as well as in environmental studies. He is the recipient of several fellowships at both national and international levels. He has served as a visiting scientist at Jinan University, Guangzhou, China. Currently, he is involved with a number of international research projects with different government organizations. To date, Dr. Hakeem has authored and edited more than 60 books with international publishers. He also has to his credit more than 115 research publications in peer-reviewed international journals and 55 book chapters in edited volumes with international publishers. At present, Dr. Hakeem serves as an editorial board member and reviewer for several high-impact international scientific journals. He is included in the advisory board of Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK. He is also a fellow of the Plantae group of the American Society of Plant Biologists, member of the World Academy of Sciences, member of the International Society for Development and Sustainability, Japan, and member of the Asian Federation of Biotechnology, Korea.

Khalid Zaffar Masoodi, PhD, is Assistant Professor in the Division of Plant Biotechnology at Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology of Kashmir, India. Dr. Masoodi is a recipient of a SERB Early Career Research Award (2016); Travel Award, SBUR, USA (2012); Society of Endocrinology Journal Award (2018), Glasgow, UK; and many more. Dr. Masoodi holds a distinction of qualifying CSIR-UGC net in Life Sciences, DBT-BET JRF, and GATE. His laboratory (Transcriptomics Laboratory also called as K-Lab, inspired by Klenow fragment at SKUAST-K) is well equipped with fluorescence imaging and RT-PCR technology and state-of-art instruments. His research focus is on multidimensional work in transcriptomics of stress biology (biotic/abiotic) in plants and drug discovery from medicinal plants against prostate cancer. Apart from that he is extensively working on DNA barcoding. He has written well-received papers published in Oncogene, Molecular Cancer therapeutics, Endocrinology, Plos One, Journal of Functional Foods, Physiologia Planetarium, and many more, and has over 200 sequences in Genbank. Currently he has three externally funded projects from SERB and NMPB that focus on high throughput screening of medicinal plants for prostate cancer and cisgenic apple. In 2019–20 Dr. Masoodi filed five patent applications with the Indian Patent Office. He has also deciphered the whole transcriptome of apple and discovered new genes involved in imparting scab resistance. He holds a master’s and PhD degree in Biotechnology. After completing his PhD, he worked in Prof. Zhou Wang’s Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh, PA, USA, as Postdoctoral Associate.