Makhdum Ahmed is an award-winning physician-scientist and a drug-development leader in the global biopharmaceutical industry. He was Director of the Cancer Moonshots Program in the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and a former Fellow at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. He received MD from University of Dhaka, MPH from University of Wollongong, and PhD in Cancer Genetics from University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.

Makhdum is published widely in the scientific literature and focuses on identifying new treatments for aggressive cancers. His research works led to multiple patents and were published in prestigious journals, including Science, Blood, British Journal of Hematology, among others. Makhdum authored/co-authored about 120 articles in the field of cancer research, disease burden and precision medicine.   

He won the Australian Leadership Awards (2009) and the Global Health Corps (GHC) Fellowship (2011) for outstanding leadership and commitment to equitable change in health care. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.