Muneer Abbas is a researcher in the Department of Microbiology at Howard University. He received his M.S. degree in Immunoparasitology from Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan in 1996. After his Master’s, Mr. Abbas joined the Immunoparasitology laboratory at Yarmouk university as a Research assistant. His research was mainly focused on Incrimination of possible Sandfly vectors for Leishmania parasites in a focus for Leishmania Tropica, Northern Jordan. In 1999, He accepted a position as a faculty member in the college of Medicine, King Khalid University in Saudi Arabia, where he was Lecturing Immunology and Performing Serological HLA Tissue typing in the Microbiology Laboratory.

In the NHGC, Mr. Abbas’s research is focused on investigating polymorphisms in genes underlying innate and acquired immune responses and their associations with diseases caused by infectious agents. His research originated from the scientific fact that adaptation to pathogens in the environment is the primary function of the host immune system and as such a target in the evolution of genomic polymorphisms that are protective in host defense against pathogens. This motivated researcher mastered various tools that he is using to read the genetic code such as HLA sequence based typing, reverse sequence-specific oligonucleotide probe (rSSOP) typing, gene scan, restriction enzyme molecular DNA genotyping and mutation detection using the WAVE nucleic fragment analysis system.