Dr. Hassan Almoustafa is currently working as a Lecturer at Department of Pharmacology, Faculty of Medicine, Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Before joining UM faculty of Medicine as a PhD student he practiced Community Pharmacy in Syria while obtaining a masters degree in biomedical engineering from the University of Aleppo. He obtained his PhD from Faculty of Medicine, University of Malaya in 2021 where he had his Post Doctoral Research Fellowship. His area of expertise is drug delivery and his research interests are Nanomedicine in cancer treatment particulary polymeric nanoparticle formulations and the industrial scale up of Nanotechnology based medications.

Trained in Cultural Studies, I am a researcher engaging in interdisciplinary research on culture. My research is primarily concerned with the cultural history of modern and contemporary China through the lens of ‘folk’ or minjian. In particular, I am interested in how ‘folk’ has been discursively constructed by the state and intellectuals throughout the 20th century, and how it continues to be represented at heritage sites, folk art museums, folk art fairs, as well as contemporary art exhibitions in the 21st century. My interdisciplinary PhD training in Cultural Studies in Asia at the National University of Singapore has taught me to be a questioner, committed to promoting critical and creative thinking as a mode of living beyond academia. Being a practitioner of critical pedagogy, I always problematize preconceived ideas that have shaped our understandings of the world. As a lecturer, I believe that classroom is where knowledge is produced and challenged through productive dialogues between teachers and students. Besides teaching in the classroom, I am also an active listener keen on translating students’ personal experience and knowledge into discussion materials. Critical discussion could help students reflect upon how our perception of the world is sociologically constructed. Students are not passive learners but knowledge producers. My role as a teacher is to acknowledge students’ opinions as knowledge and situate their knowledge within a larger socio-political, economic, and cultural contexts so as to allow them to scrutinize their common sense.

Dr. Junaid Olawale Quazim is a senior lecturer at the Department of Parasitology, Faculty of Medicine, Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur. He obtained his PhD in Medical Parasitology from the Universiti Malaya (UM) in 2018. Prior to this, he did his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Nigeria before he joined academics, at Federal University Kashere, Gombe State, Nigeria, as a Lecturer in 2012. He got scholarship from the Nigerian Government for his PhD programme in 2014. Hence, he went back to Nigeria after his PhD to continue his job as a Lecturer until he joined the Department of Parasitology, Faculty of Medicine, Universiti Malaya in May, 2023 as a senior lecturer. Dr. Junaid’s work centers on mosquito-borne parasitic diseases (malaria and filariasis), zoonotic filariasis, interactions between the parasites, hosts and vectors, and immunology. Presently, he has an international collaboration with Humboldt Research Hub-Center for Emerging & Re-emerging Infectious Diseases (HRH-CERID) at Ladoke Akintola University of Technology (LAUTECH), Ogbomoso Oyo State, Nigeria, working on ‘Molecular Surveillance for HRP2/3 Gene Deletion in Nigeria’. He has published over 17 articles in various categories of journals.