An interview with 2025 Elizabeth D. Hay New Investigator Award recipient Mubarak Syed

12/9/2025

Mubarak Syed, Assistant Professor in the Biology Department at the University of New Mexico (UNM) in Albuquerque, New Mexico is the 2025 recipient of the Society for Developmental Biology Elizabeth D. Hay New Investigator Award. The prestigious award recognizes new investigators who have performed outstanding research in developmental biology during the early stages of their independent career.

Syed’s independent group leverages developmental and behavioural neuroscience expertise to understand how temporal, genetic, and molecular cues generate neural diversity and guide function of the adult Drosophila central complex, a region in the brain that controls spatial aspects of sensory integration and motor control in the organism.

Syed’s journey into science is inspiring, to say the least. He grew up in a small mountain village in Kashmir, a region fraught with conflict. “(Kashmir is) very beautiful but has always been in war. Most of our schooling, I think back in ’89-’03, the schools were often closed,” he said.

After obtaining his MS in Biochemistry from the University of Kashmir, in search of opportunities and exploration, he embarked on a three-day journey to Bangalore, almost 3,000 kilometers south of Kashmir, landing at the National Center for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in India. As an outsider, he would visit NCBS daily and chat with scientists from various fields. He chanced upon a poster for a developmental biology workshop organized by the late Ben-Zion “Benny” Shilo, who organized the workshop every two years at NCBS.

“I had to submit a statement of purpose, and I still remember, I didn’t know much about what SOP meant, and I went to the library and found Gilbert’s Developmental Biology textbook, which I read to write the SOP for the workshop, and which I still use to teach now. Luckily, they selected me,” Syed said.

During the workshop, he met Veronica Rodriguez and Vijay Raghavan, two leading developmental neuroscientists at NCBS, who welcomed Syed into their labs as a volunteer mentee. His first project, knocking down genes in glial cells in the Drosophila olfactory system, set the stage for his lifelong interest in developmental neurobiology. Syed received a place in the International Max Planck PhD Program, and worked with Christian Klämbt at the University of Münster, Germany to study the formation and function of the blood-brain barrier in Drosophila, showing that it requires a new family of septate junction molecules.

Once again, Syed’s path took a positive turn at a workshop – this time, at the Okinawa Developmental Neuroscience workshop. There, he met his future postdoctoral mentor, Chris Doe, from University of Oregon. In the Doe lab, Syed worked on elucidating how stem cells generate neuronal diversity. He identified, for the first time, how an extrinsic hormonal signal could regulate temporal factor expression. He also developed a desire to link neural stem cell types to animal behaviour, which he is actively pursuing now in his independent lab at the University of New Mexico.

Since his lab’s founding in 2019, Syed and his lab have collaborated with behavioural neuroscientists to study molecular and cellular mechanisms governing the generation and differentiation of neural subtypes of the sleep-wake and olfactory navigation circuits. In a recent study, his group conducted lineage analysis and genetic birth dating to identify the neural stem cell type that generates specific neurons in the Drosophila sleep-wake system. They then showed how extrinsic hormonal signalling acts on neural stem cells to generate the neuronal diversity required for adult sleep behaviour.

Syed’s enormous efforts in championing diversity in science stand as tall as his scientific endeavours. As a mentor, Syed is a proponent of culturally aware mentoring, especially when more than half of students at UNM are Hispanic/Latinx.

“Where I grew up in my generation, we knew the struggles of life, and our educational institutions had limited resources. When you come to the United States, you realize there is an unfair distribution of resources. In New Mexico, the Native American communities, Pueblo communities, there is not much there; in Oregon, if you were in a village or an area that was less economically developed, it’s very different,” he said.

Syed believes all students will succeed if given the chance and proper mentoring and training. To reach out to marginalized communities and get them excited about science, he began the Pueblo Brain Science Program, serving schools on Zia, Jemez, and Navajo Reservations, as well as other rural schools in the area. He organizes a variety of undergraduate research opportunities, classroom outreach and annual neuroscience workshops in his community. For the past 3 years, high school students, teachers, undergrads, graduate students, and faculty from outside New Mexico, have come to UMN for three days of hands-on neuroscience-related activities and talks by Native scientists about their experience living on the Reservations and their journey into science.

Syed organizes a lot of workshops because he feels it is important for students to have opportunities to meet people and network, allowing them to benefit as he did by attending workshops at NCBS and in Okinawa. He finds that developmental biology is an ideal topic for these workshops. “I think development is a topic everyone can dip their toes in, because everything involves development. That’s the beauty of it,” Syed said.

Syed also founded a mentoring and networking group, JKScientists, to support students with disadvantaged backgrounds in Jammu and Kashmir. In today’s world, Syed and the team who assist him with these efforts are a shining beacon of building diversity in science.

“I think there will be times in your life when you feel like things are not going the way they should. You feel like you don’t know much, and my first two years of faculty life was that. But you consistently keep doing stuff and overnight, you get an award from NSF and then things change, you know,” he said. “No matter what happens, you should keep doing what makes you happy. All these programs take time, but at the same time they make me happy.”

“I am the same person who I was before, but the mentality changes. There will be stressful times, like right now, but it is all temporary and things change. There will be a time when science and education is valued again, so you have to stay consistent,” he added.

He urges trainees to network through events organized by scientific communities. “Be proactive and ask for help. There are people who will support you, they are there to help you,” he said. “You will go to meetings at some point, and if you want to invite PIs for lunch, invite them, talk to them, be interactive. This skill takes time.”

“Be mindful and have respect for everybody; we are all unique and valued individuals.”

Syed would like to thank the many mentors who have shaped his life, students who are working in his lab, and many colleagues and collaborators who have always been with him and supported him. He is grateful for the developmental biology community and to the Society for Developmental Biology, for giving trainees and young investigators opportunities to showcase their science. “This is something which I have not imagined; as someone coming from Kashmir, getting this recognition is huge,” he said.

Last Updated 01/30/2026