Dr. Ahmed A Azad is a retired academic and biomedical scientist, who has had a lifelong involvement in the discovery, development and commercialisation of biotech vaccines and drugs. He made pioneering contributions to understanding the role of RNA-RNA interactions in protein synthesis and was a Research Fellow at the Research School of Biological Sciences, ANU, Canberra.

He was the Principal Investigator on the National Biotechnology Program Grant for the IBDV vaccine project. He worked on projects of cloning and sequencing gene segments and the development of a recombinant subunit vaccine against infectious bursal disease virus (IBDV) for which he shared the CSIRO Chairman’s Medal in 1997. He also received the 1993 B. Rispens Memorial Award for Avian Pathology for the IBDV vaccine research.