Kashmiri scientist receives American Botanical Council's ‘2025 Norman R Farnsworth Excellence award’

Srinagar, Mar 28: A Kashmir-born scientist has bagged the coveted 2025 Norman R. Farnsworth Excellence in Botanical Research Award presented by the American Botanical Council (ABC).  Dr Ghulam Nabi Qazi, PhD, the director general and CEO of Hamdard Institute of Medical Sciences and Research (HIMSR) in New Delhi, India is a name to reckon in the field of Life Sciences. Dr Qazi has more than 40 years of research experience and expertise in biochemistry, microbial biotechnology, bioprospecting of natural products, quality control, and clinical validation of traditional Indian herbal medicines, among other areas.

ABC presents the annual award, named in honor of the internationally respected professor Norman R. Farnsworth, PhD (1930–2011), to an individual who has made significant research contributions in the fields of pharmacognosy (the study of drugs of natural origin, usually from plants), ethnobotany, ethnopharmacology, or other scientific disciplines related to medicinal plants. Farnsworth was a widely published and internationally renowned research professor of pharmacognosy, a senior university scholar in the University of Illinois at Chicago’s College of Pharmacy, and one of the founding members of ABC’s Board of Trustees.

“I am grateful and feel honored by this recognition of my contributions to the knowledge of natural products science and the development of standardised products,” Qazi said in a pre-recorded acceptance speech. Qazi received his master’s degree in biochemistry and his PhD in microbiology from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. He conducted postdoctoral research in biochemical engineering at Technical University Dortmund in Dortmund, Germany.

Qazi has been with HIMSR since 2016. The institute, which he helped establish, focuses on medical education for both undergraduates and graduate students and is affiliated with Jamia Hamdard University (JHU) in New Delhi. Previously, Qazi was the vice chancellor of JHU, where he worked from 2008 to 2016. As vice chancellor, Qazi worked to integrate Unani medicine into pharmacy curricula. Unani is one of the traditional medicine systems of India, focusing on the uses of herbs and medicinal plants from the Greco-Arabic tradition. At JHU Qazi oversaw the completion of more than 30 graduate students’ PhDs.

Before his time at JHU, Qazi was the senior director of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research–Indian Institute of Integrative Medicine (CSIR–IIIM) in Jammu, India, from 2000 to 2008. This government research institute is tasked with discovering “new drugs and therapeutic approaches from natural products, both of plant and microbial origin, enabled by biotechnology, to develop technologies, drugs, and products of high value for the national and international markets.” At CSIR–IIIM, Qazi had several notable research accomplishments, including the isolation and characterisation of a group of withanolides and withaferin molecules from one of India’s most famous medicinal plants — ashwagandha (Withania somnifera) root — and boswellic acids from frankincense gum — also known as boswellia (Boswellia serrata). In an email acknowledging his receipt of the 2025 ABC Farnsworth Award, Qazi referred to these achievements as “a source of professional satisfaction” and “a significant and fascinating addition to the knowledge repository of bioactive natural materials for pharmaceutical research.”

Qazi has been a part of several educational or scientific committees in India. He was the chairman of both the Drugs and Pharmaceutical Research Programme and the Unani Pharmacopeia Committee of the Government of India and a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Indian Pharmacopoeia Commission. Among many medicinal plant research journal editorial boards and related advisory and editorial positions, Qazi has been a longtime member of the ABC Advisory Board. Throughout his career, Qazi has authored or co-authored several book chapters and more than 250 research papers in scientific journals. He also holds more than 60 international patents and has been an invited lecturer on fermentation technology and genetic engineering at universities and institutes around the world.

“India is a vast storehouse of traditional medicinal plants that have been used for centuries and millennia in traditional medicinal systems, and recent years have seen much scientific and clinical research on their safety and therapeutic benefits,” said ABC Founder and Executive Director Mark Blumenthal. “In the past decades Dr. Qazi has been one of the key Indian scientists who have been a formative and driving force in the development of modern research on Indian medicinal plants. If he were still alive today, I am quite certain that Norman Farnsworth would wholeheartedly approve of ABC’s recognition of Dr. Qazi’s immense body of scientific research with the ABC Farnsworth Award.” ABC Chief Science Officer Stefan Gafner, PhD, said: “I am thrilled that a scientist from India has been selected as this year’s ABC Farnsworth awardee. Dr. Qazi has laid part of the scientific foundation on which our current understanding and therapeutic use of important medicinal plants like ashwagandha, boswellia, and picrorhiza. In my opinion, his research has been among the most impactful for the herbal medicine community, especially as it related to plants used in traditional systems of Indian medicine.”

Past recipients of the ABC Farnsworth award include: Robin Marles, PhD (2024); Michael Heinrich, PhD (2023); Guido F. Pauli, PhD (2022); Paula N. Brown, PhD (2020); Rachel Mata, PhD (2019); the late Otto Sticher, PhD (2018); the late Raphael Mechoulam, PhD (2017); Ameenah Gurib-Fakim, PhD (2016); John T. Arnason, PhD (2015); Harry Fong, PhD (2014); Gordon Cragg, PhD (2013); De-An Guo, PhD (2012); Doel Djaja Soejarto, PhD (2011); A. Douglas Kinghorn, PhD (2010); Rudolf Bauer, PhD (2009); Ikhlas Khan, PhD (2008); the late Hildebert Wagner, PhD (2007); Edzard Ernst, MD, PhD (2006); and Joseph M. Betz, PhD (2005).

The 2025 Farnsworth Award was presented at the 20th annual ABC Celebration and Botanical Excellence Awards Ceremony on March 4, 2025, in Anaheim, California, during the annual Natural Products Expo West conference and trade show. The ABC Celebration and Botanical Excellence Awards were generously underwritten by donations from the following sponsors from the medicinal plant industry and community: Alkemist Labs, Amin Wasserman Gurnani, Applied Food Sciences, Brassica Protection Products, Cepham, Eurofins, Euromed, Gaia Herbs, Herb Pharm, Indena, Informa, Nature’s Way, NOW Foods, Pharmatoka, RFI, RT Specialty, Sabinsa, Talati, Terry Naturally/EuroPharma, and the United Natural Product Association.