 Towards the latter part of his career, he worked on "the synthesis of metal‑metal sulphides/metal oxide nanoparticles" using fungi and it was reported that the team synthesized the nano-particles outside a cell for the first time.His studies have been documented by way of a number of articles and PubMed, an online article repository of scientific articles has listed several of them.The Indian National Science Academy awarded Khan the INSA Young Scientist Medal in 1987.