Dr. Yogesh Hooda is a molecular microbiologist and Senior Scientist at the Child Health Research Foundation (CHRF) in Dhaka, Bangladesh. His research seeks to understand how bacterial pathogens evolve, interact with their hosts and bacteriophages, and cause disease, with the goal of translating these insights into better approaches for surveillance, prevention, and treatment of infectious diseases. His group works at the intersection of molecular microbiology, microbial genomics, bacteriophage biology, antimicrobial resistance, and infectious-disease epidemiology. A major focus is Salmonella Typhi and other enteric pathogens, including the molecular mechanisms underlying phage susceptibility and resistance, bacterial defence systems, mobile genetic elements, and pathogen evolution. The group also studies invasive bacterial pathogen - Klebsiella pneumoniae, connecting mechanistic laboratory studies with large genomic and clinical datasets from Bangladesh. More broadly, Dr. Hooda is interested in building research approaches that bridge scales: from genes, proteins, and host-pathogen interactions to population-level pathogen dynamics. His work increasingly integrates genomics, computational biology, epidemiological modelling, and AI-enabled approaches to extract biological and public-health insights from longitudinal surveillance systems. Dr. Hooda received his PhD from the University of Toronto, where he studied the molecular mechanisms of bacterial membrane protein biogenesis, and subsequently conducted postdoctoral research at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. At CHRF, he leads and collaborates on multidisciplinary research programs aimed at addressing infectious diseases of major importance in Bangladesh and other low- and middle-income settings, while helping develop local capacity in molecular microbiology, genomics, computational biology, and data science.