Pakistani student Umair Masood has received the Young Scientist Award 2021 from Lab Roots, for his excellent contributions in the field of Molecular Diagnostic Techniques at the Seventh Annual Conference held in the USA earlier this month.
Students from 121 countries participated in the event with Pakistan securing the top spot. Umair is a student of COMSATS and hails from Abbottabad. He presented two papers at the 13th Annual International Conference on Tissue and Regenerative Medicine in the United States. Masood says he won the award with 336 votes. Adding that his counterparts from Israel and Germany had secured 264 and 164 voters respectively.
“Thanks to Allah the Almighty and my parents that I could secure this highly prestigious award for my contribution to the biotechnology field,” Masood said.
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Umair explained that in his research he suggested solutions to detect the hereditary diseases people are suffering from quickly and cheaply while the genes of any living thing can be obtained and transmitted to another.
Umair’s commendable perseverance
“It took me three and a half years [to get this distinction]. I failed in researches multiple times. I was facing financial issues. It was not that easy,” Umair said during his interview with ARY News.
“I also got disheartened because of repeated failures and thought of giving up but then motivation came from within that I can do this.”
“I could not pass the FSc exam with flying colours because I was not the kind of student who is good at learning by rote. I was not an avid reader nor did I like memorizing things but was rather interested in posing questions and learning about new things,” Umair said further.
He added that he was rejected by many universities due to his low-grades and also could not get himself enrolled in online courses offered by Stanford and Harvard University.
Umair added that he enrolled in an online class during which he came in contact with the Jackson Laboratory that was working on the project to detect hereditary diseases. He said he worked with the laboratory and received medals upon completion.
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“Then I realized that this calling was to excel in the field of biology. Whatever research I did over the next three and a half years was in biology,” he added further.