The American Botanical Council (ABC) recently presented the 2025 ABC Norman R. Farnsworth Excellence in Botanical Research award to Ghulam Nabi Qazi, PhD, director general and CEO of Hamdard Institute of Medical Sciences and Research (HIMSR) in New Delhi, India.

Qazi has more than 40 years of research experience and expertise in biochemistry, microbial biotechnology, prospecting of natural products, quality control, and clinical validation of traditional Indian herbal medicines and other products.

The award was named after professor Norman R. Farnsworth, and is given to an individual who has made significant contributions in pharmacognosy, ethnobotany, ethnopharmacology, and other scientific disciplines related to medicinal plants. Farnsworth was a widely published and internationally-renowned research professor of pharmacognosy, senior university scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s college of pharmacy, and one of the founding members of ABC’s board of trustees.

“I am grateful and feel honored by this recognition of my contributions to the knowledge of natural products science and the development of standardized products,” Qazi said.

Qazi received a master’s degree in biochemistry and PhD in microbiology from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, in Baroda, India. He continued postdoctoral research in biochemical engineering at Technical University Dortmund in Dortmund, Germany.

Qazi has been with HIMSR since 2016. The institute, which he helped establish, focuses on medical education for both undergraduates and graduate students,, and is affiliated with Jamia Hamdard University in New Delhi, where Qazi was a vice chancellor from 2008-2016. There, Qazi worked to integrate Unani, a traditional medicine system, into the pharmacy curricula, and oversaw the completion of more than 30 graduate students’ PhDs.

From 2000 to 2008, Qazi was a senior director of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research – Indian Institute of Integrative Medicine in Jammu, India, which was focused on developing new drugs and technologies from natural products of plant and microbial origin. There, Qazi isolated and characterized withanolides and withaferin molecules from ashwagandha root, and boswellic acids from Boswellia, which he referred to as “a source of professional satisfaction,” and “a significant and fascinating addition to the knowledge repository of bioactive natural materials for pharmaceutical research.”

Qazi is or has been a part of several educational or scientific committees in India. He was the chairman of both the Drugs and Pharmaceutical Research Program and the Unani Pharmacopeia Committee of the Government of India and a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Indian Pharmacopoeia Commission. Among many medicinal plant research journal editorial boards and related advisory and editorial positions, Qazi has been a longtime member of the ABC Advisory Board.

Qazi has co-authored several book chapters and over 250 research papers in scientific journals. He holds more than 60 international patents and has been an invited lecturer on fermentation technology and genetic engineering at universities and institutes around the world.

“India is a vast storehouse of traditional medicinal plants that have been used for centuries and millennia in traditional medicinal systems, and recent years have seen much scientific and clinical research on their safety and therapeutic benefits,” said Mark Blumenthal, founder and executive director of ABC. “In the past decades Dr. Qazi has been one of the key Indian scientists who have been a formative and driving force in the development of modern research on Indian medicinal plants. If he were still alive today, I am quite certain that Norman Farnsworth would wholeheartedly approve of ABC’s recognition of Dr. Qazi’s immense body of scientific research with the ABC Farnsworth Award.”

“I am thrilled that a scientist from India has been selected as this year’s ABC Farnsworth awardee. Dr. Qazi has laid part of the scientific foundation on which our current understanding and therapeutic use of important medicinal plants like ashwagandha, boswellia, and picrorhiza. In my opinion, his research has been among the most impactful for the herbal medicine community, especially as it related to plants used in traditional systems of Indian medicine,” said Stefan Gafner, PhD, chief science officer of ABC.