Arnab Pain joined KAUST in June, 2010 as a member of founding faculty in the Biological and Environmental Sciences and Engineering (BESE) Division. His research career started with a Ph.D. in Molecular Microbiology obtained from the University of Cambridge (UK) in 1996, studying microbial pathogenesis in a bacterial pathogen of edible mushrooms. Upon completing PhD, he moved to the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine (WIMM), University of Oxford, to work on host-parasite interactions and cell biology of human malaria parasites. After spending five years in Oxford, he joined the Pathogen Sequencing Unit (PSU) at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (WTSI) in Cambridge as a Senior Scientist. In WTSI, he was responsible for coordinating various large-scale genome projects of several apicomplexan parasites. In 2015, he was awarded a Distinguished Professorship at the Global Center for Zoonosis Control in Hokkaido university, Sapporo, Japan under the Global Institution of Collaborative Research and Education (GI-CoRE) program, funded by the Japanese government.
To date, he has authored over 130 research publications, including book chapters and reviews, in the field of pathogen genomics and biology in several top-tier journals. Dr. Pain holds various professional memberships including Faculty of 1000 (Microbial Evolution and Genomics), British Society for Parasitology, Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, London and the Royal Society of Biology, London.