Zulfiqur is Research Professor & Director of Healthcare - Innovation Partnerships. His research interests are in micro and nanofabrication approaches for creating devices that are high density and are more functional. Much of this work has focussed on microfluidics for point-of-care diagnostic devices and for complex chemical and biological processing on a chip. Particular interests includes: electrochemical and optical sensing, microfluidics; bionanotechnology; microfabrication and soft computing for primarily pattern recognition. He is an International Program Committee for MEDICON 2013 a conference of the International Federation of Medical and Biological Engineering (IFMBE). He has been an international panel member for the Higher Education Academy (HEA) of Ireland.

Zulfiqur has coordinated a number of EU projects including FP6 DVT-IMP developing a point-of-care device for Deep Vein Thrombosis, MAPTech for development for Micro-Analytical Platform Technology and FP7 InFuLoC for development of an integrated and Functional Lab-on-chip. Zulfiqur was also involved in the FP7 Diginova project developing a roadmap for digital fabrication. Most recently, he led the Teesside University activity in the Horizon 2020 GateOne project on smart system integration for SMEs.

Zulfiqur is currently Chief Executive Officer for Anasyst a start-up company that arose from collaborative work with colleague Dr Meez Islam. Anasyst is focussed on commercialising Cavity Enhanced Absorption Spectrometry for liquid based sensing, optical ammonia sensing and microfluidics based point-of-care diagnostics. www.anasyst.com