Muhammad Ashraf

Muhammad Ashraf is a Pakistani botanist whose research on how plants tolerate salinity, drought and other stresses has made him one of the most-cited plant scientists in the world. He took his PhD at the University of Liverpool in 1986, became Vice Chancellor of the University of Agriculture, Faisalabad, and later Rector of the University of Lahore. No biographical source consulted for this record gives his birth year, and none is recorded. ^{1 2}

He began his research career in 1983, when he was admitted to the Department of Botany at the University of Liverpool to work on the improvement of salinity tolerance in some forage crops. He took his PhD there in 1986, published more than twenty papers from the doctoral and postdoctoral work, held a US Fulbright award at the University of Arizona in 1993, and was later awarded the DSc by Liverpool. His screening techniques tested tens of thousands of plants under high selection pressure, and the salt-tolerant wheat line S24 developed from this work is used as a salt-tolerant check as far away as CIMMYT in Mexico; he also had a hand in the Ramzan mungbean (2006), the Nifa-2005 chickpea and the MNH-988 cotton variety. His teams showed that salt tolerance changes with a plant's growth stage and that the salt-exclusion hypothesis cannot be generalised across species. He has supervised 74 PhD students. ¹

At the University of Lahore, whose rector he became, an interview reported the second edition of the Research.com rankings, in which he stood twelfth among the world's top-cited plant science researchers, with 72,461 citations and 1,169 publications; he described his programme there as addressing the plant stresses — drought, salinity, waterlogging, temperature extremes — that bear hardest on Asian and African agriculture. ²

The Pakistan Council for Science and Technology's directories of Productive Scientists of Pakistan placed him first in Agriculture and Biological Sciences in 2010 and again, with an overall second position, in 2010-11. He received the 26th Khwarizmi Award (2012) and a medal from the FAO for his work in plant stress physiology and molecular biology, was named HEC Distinguished National Professor in 2005, took first position in biosciences in the COMSTECH ranking of scientists across the OIC countries, and received the Higher Education Commission's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013 and the Hilal-i-Imtiaz in 2016. ¹