Pepper Virome

Professor (Dr.) Akhtar Ali earned his PhD (1994–1999) in plant virology from the University of Adelaide, Australia, and is now a professor at the Department of Biological Sciences, The University of Tulsa (TU), Oklahoma, USA. He has held several postdoctoral positions in plant virology at the Tohoku Agricultural Research Center (TARC), Morioka, Japan (1999–2001), at the CSIRO in Adelaide, Australia (2002–2004), and at the Sam Robert Noble Research Institute in Ardmore, Oklahoma, USA (2004–2007). In 2007, he joined the University of Tulsa as an assistant professor and was promoted to associate professor in 2012 and full professor in 2020. In 2017, Dr. Ali was awarded a US Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Okayama and worked on mycoviruses. His courses cover everything from human disease to plants, and he developed and taught several courses (Experimental Techniques in Molecular Biology, Introduction to Virology, and Biology of Cancer) to both undergraduate and graduate students. His research interests include virus evolution, genetic bottlenecks, epidemiology, and the molecular characterization of plants and mycoviruses in various agricultural crops. He has supervised >20 PhD/MS students, published over 100 scientific papers, 12 book chapters, and presented 22 papers at international and 85 papers at various national conferences. Dr. Ali served as an editor for several international journals, such as Plant Disease, PhytoFrontier, Pathogens, PLOS One, and Frontiers in Virology and Microbiology. In 2023, Dr. Ali was awarded the Zelimir Schmidt Award for Outstanding Researcher by the College of Engineering and Natural Science at the University of Tulsa.