Asyraf is a senior lecturer at Universiti Putra Malaysia and has worked in the field of molecular plant pathology for six years; he has authored more than 15 publications. While working toward his PhD (with a fellowship from the Ministry of Higher Education of Malaysia), he studied the function of the Sr22, Sr33, Sr35, and Sr45 wheat stem rust resistance genes in barley. He also characterized the function and evolution of the Sr22 resistance genes and studied the sequence variation between different Sr22 alleles.