 The Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India awarded him the National Bioscience Award for Career Development, one of the highest Indian science awards, for his contributions to biosciences in 2002.Born on the Christmas eve of 1957, Mohammad Islam Khan obtained an MSc in biotechnology in 1978 and joined the Indian Institute of Chemical Biology (IICB) as a faculty, simultaneously doing his doctoral research at the Indian Institute of Science which earned him a PhD in 1986 from Aligarh Muslim University.Moving to the US, he did his post-doctoral work at Albert Einstein College of Medicine during 1987–90 and on his return to India in 1990, he joined the National Chemical Laboratory (NCL) as a scientist where he spent the rest of his career, barring a stint at the University of Göttingen during 2000–01 as an overseas associate of the Department of Biotechnology.