Dr. Muhammad Shahid Javaid is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Neuroscience, School of Translational Medicine, Monash University. He completed his PhD from Monash University and presented his research work on national and international platforms.  

In the Stem Cell laboratory, his research focus is on the development of precision medicines by generating human stem cell-based in vitro epilepsy models. He has developed expertise in the biological reprogramming of patients’ blood cells into stem cells- cells with the potential to become any part of the human body. Then converting stem cells into brain cells or neurons and 3D brain organoids to create personalised ‘disease-in-a-dish’ models for each patient with medically intractable epilepsy.

This work allows the screening and testing of a wide range of existing or new potential anti-epileptic drugs. This work recapitulates human pathophysiology without posing any risk to the patient and can be scaled up to an industrial level to screen thousands of potential drug candidates.

Shahid’s expertise also includes bioinformatics-based computer-aided medicine designing to predict the interaction of potential drug candidates with human receptor proteins.

His career objectives are to utilize his multidisciplinary research experience in the fields of Neuroscience, Stem Cells, and Bioinformatics to investigate the causative mechanisms underlying refractory epilepsy in Australian patients and to develop precision medicines.