Published: 09:40 AM, 09 May 2025
Dr. Tahmeed Ahmed named on Time 100 health list
ICDDR,B Executive Director, Dr Tahmeed Ahmed, has been named to TIME’s 2025 TIME100 Health list, recognizing the 100 most influential individuals in global health this year.
Dr Tahmeed’s inclusion is a powerful recognition of his decades-long commitment to addressing malnutrition and improving maternal and child health through science, compassion, and community-driven solutions. Under his leadership, icddr,b has continued to innovate in ways that have reached millions of lives across Bangladesh and beyond.
He will join global health leaders at the TIME100 Impact Dinner in New York on May 13, where he has also been invited to deliver a short, inspirational toast — a TIME tradition spotlighting change makers shaping the future of health.
In Dr Tahmeed’s words: “I am deeply grateful to TIME for this recognition, which I hope will draw greater global attention to the fight against malnutrition — and remind us to invest not in war, conflict, or division, but in science, equity, and the dignity of human life.”
When Dr. Tahmeed Ahmed began seeing patients fresh from graduating medical school in his native Bangladesh, he saw one problem over and over again that all of his medical training could do little to change. “I took care of patients suffering from diarrhea and malnutrition, and it was very frustrating for me especially to take care of children, some of whom would die,” he says. “There were not many things we could do despite all of our best intentions and efforts.”
So as Ahmed began his career at ICDDR,B (formerly the International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh), where he is now executive director, he decided to address the problem. A chance encounter with Dr. Jeffrey Gordon, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, over breakfast in 2009 sparked a potential solution. Gordon was studying how the bacteria in the gut differed in people with obesity and those with malnutrition. Could these microbes be the key to a novel treatment for malnutrition? When Ahmed and his colleagues went into the slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh, they found an interesting dichotomy. Some children were healthy, while others suffered from malnutrition, wasting, and stunted growth. What distinguished the healthy children, he found, was their gut microbiome, and what heavily influenced these bacteria was their diet. Working with Gordon, Ahmed identified the beneficial gut bugs that were helping the healthy children, and traced them to the kinds of things they were eating, including tilapia, chickpeas, green bananas, and peanuts.
Dr Tahmeed’s inclusion is a powerful recognition of his decades-long commitment to addressing malnutrition and improving maternal and child health through science, compassion, and community-driven solutions. Under his leadership, icddr,b has continued to innovate in ways that have reached millions of lives across Bangladesh and beyond.
He will join global health leaders at the TIME100 Impact Dinner in New York on May 13, where he has also been invited to deliver a short, inspirational toast — a TIME tradition spotlighting change makers shaping the future of health.
In Dr Tahmeed’s words: “I am deeply grateful to TIME for this recognition, which I hope will draw greater global attention to the fight against malnutrition — and remind us to invest not in war, conflict, or division, but in science, equity, and the dignity of human life.”
When Dr. Tahmeed Ahmed began seeing patients fresh from graduating medical school in his native Bangladesh, he saw one problem over and over again that all of his medical training could do little to change. “I took care of patients suffering from diarrhea and malnutrition, and it was very frustrating for me especially to take care of children, some of whom would die,” he says. “There were not many things we could do despite all of our best intentions and efforts.”
So as Ahmed began his career at ICDDR,B (formerly the International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh), where he is now executive director, he decided to address the problem. A chance encounter with Dr. Jeffrey Gordon, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, over breakfast in 2009 sparked a potential solution. Gordon was studying how the bacteria in the gut differed in people with obesity and those with malnutrition. Could these microbes be the key to a novel treatment for malnutrition? When Ahmed and his colleagues went into the slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh, they found an interesting dichotomy. Some children were healthy, while others suffered from malnutrition, wasting, and stunted growth. What distinguished the healthy children, he found, was their gut microbiome, and what heavily influenced these bacteria was their diet. Working with Gordon, Ahmed identified the beneficial gut bugs that were helping the healthy children, and traced them to the kinds of things they were eating, including tilapia, chickpeas, green bananas, and peanuts.
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