Meet the editor

Professor Mehdi Razzaghi-Abyaneh obtained his Ph.D. in Mycology from Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran-Iran. In 2006/2007, he completed a training course on the identification of antifungal compounds from bioactive plants at the laboratory of the Department of Applied Biological Chemistry, Graduate School of Agriculture, Tokyo University, Japan. He is currently a full professor and head of the Mycology Department, Pasteur

Institute of Iran, where he is working on mycotoxins and mycotoxigenic fungi as well as antifungal nanomaterial, and biologically active antifungals of plant, fungal, and bacterial origin. He has supervised numerous Ph.D. and MSc theses and published more than 150 papers in peer-reviewed international journals, 10 books, and several book chapters. He is studying the chemical basis of plant-fungal interactions and determining the mode of action of antifungal peptides and other small and macromolecules at cellular and molecular levels.

Professor Mahendra Rai is a visiting scientist at Nicolaus Copernicus University, Torun, Poland. He has published 380 research papers, more than 102 journal articles, and more than 60 books. He is a member of several scientific societies and has been a national scholar for five years. He received several prestigious awards, including the father T.A. Mathias award (1989) from the All India Association for Christian Higher Education, and the

Medini award (1999) from the Department of Environment and Forest, Government of India. He also received a SERC visiting fellowship from the Department of Science and Technology (1996), INSA visiting fellowship from the Indian National Science Academy (1998), and TWAS-UNESCO Associateship (2002), Italy. Dr. Rai was also awarded a UGC-BSR faculty fellowship by the University Grants Commission, New Delhi. He serves as a referee for twenty international journals and is an editorial board member for ten national and international journals. He has approximately three decades of teaching and research experience. The main focus of his research is plant and nano-based bioactive against human pathogenic microbes.

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