Speakers

Nabil-Fareed Alikhan is a microbial genomicist and bioinformatician working at the intersection of population genomics, comparative genomics, and data science. He is currently a Senior Bioinformatician at the Centre for Genomic Pathogen Surveillance at the University of Oxford, where he develops and applies large-scale genomic approaches to understand pathogen evolution, transmission, and public health risk.

Nabil’s research is driven by a simple question: microbes evolve quickly—so what does that variation actually mean, and how do we turn it into usable knowledge? His work spans ancient DNA to modern genomic surveillance, focusing on enteric pathogens such as Salmonella, and on making sense of genomic change across time, space, and scale. He has contributed to widely used tools and platforms including EnteroBase and BRIG, and has been involved in national and international genomic surveillance efforts, including during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Previously, he served as Interim Head of Informatics at Quadram Institute Bioscience and held research fellowships at the University of Warwick, working with population-scale genomic datasets and building systems that support real-world decision-making.