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Prajwol Manandhar

Prajwol Manandhar is the Senior Bioinformatics Specialist at CMDN/Intrepid and a dedicated leopard researcher. He has been leading the bioinformatics department for six years at CMDN, along with development of wildlife genetics programs. With the advent of the global COVID pandemic, he began   working in genome sequencing analysis of SARS-CoV-2 using Illumina/Nanopore technologies at CMDN to strengthen the Nepali response to the crisis.

He has a strong focus on one-health dynamics and specializes in 16s and shotgun metagenomics, whole genome resequencing, phylogenetic, while evolutionary biology and population genetics of wildlife biodiversity are his major field of expertise. He has been studying the evolutionary history of leopards (Panthera pardus) along with their ecology, diet, population genetics in the Nepalese Himalayas using various genomics-based tools to understand human-leopard interaction dynamics and contribute to leopard conservation. He has received MSc in Bioinformatics from University of Tampere, Finland where he gained his bioinformatics skill training. He has published multiple papers in ecology, population genetics, molecular forensics, gut microbiota, phylogenetic and evolutionary biology of various wildlife biodiversity of Nepal and travelled across various terrains of the Himalayas for his field expeditions.