Professor Arnab Pain’s research focuses on the uses of a combination of high-throughput sequencing, comparative and functional genomics, and bioinformatic tools to study natural population diversity and pathogenicity determinants in parasitic protists, bacteria, and fungi, and, more recently, viruses that are of major relevance to human and animal health. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, U.K., and postdoctoral training at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine in Oxford, U.K. Before joining KAUST in 2010, he was based at Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, U.K., where he focused on several comparative genomics projects of major parasitic and fungal pathogens of humans and animals. Professor Pain is active in numerous professional organizations. Since 2015, he has been appointed as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the International Institute for Zoonosis Control and the Institute for Vaccine Research and Development at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan. He also held a Visiting Professor of Genomics position (2018-20) at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Laboratory Sciences at the University of Oxford and an Honorary Professorship (2021-24) in the Department of Tropical Disease Biology at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) in the U.K. He has co-authored over 200 publications and six IP disclosures. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Biology (FRSB). 

Professor Pain's group uses a combination of the latest DNA and RNA sequencing, and other omics-based methods coupled with functional genomics, cell biology, and bioinformatics tools to undertake research in the following priority areas: 

• Comparative genomics and adaptive evolution in Malaria and other Apicomplexan parasites relevant to human and animal health. 

• Pandemic preparedness for early detection and integrated monitoring of emerging and re-emerging pathogens in environmental and clinical samples by metagenomics and metatranscriptomics. 

• Genomic epidemiology and surveillance of major infectious agents such as coronaviruses, dengue and hospital-acquired infections in Saudi Arabia and the neighboring countries. 

• Next-generation sequencing-guided diagnosis of pathogens and microbiomes in human health and disease. 

Many of the above studies are conducted in active partnership with several national and international partner organizations.