About Me
Welcome to Microbeonline.com. I am Tankeshwar Acharya, Assistant Professor and Microbiologist at the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Patan Academy of Health Sciences, Lalitpur, Nepal.
Tankeshwar Acharya
Assistant Professor of Microbiology and Immunology Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Patan Academy of Health Sciences (PAHS), Lalitpur, Nepal
The Road to Microbiology
I did not arrive in microbiology in a straight line.
As a teenager, I wanted to become a physician. My mother had asthma, and I wanted to be the person who could treat her. When that path closed for financial reasons, I chose microbiology partly by circumstance, modelling my direction after Professor Dr. Bharatmani Pokhrel, a Fulbright scholar and an eminent Nepalese microbiologist.
I studied hard, secured distinction throughout, but I carried a quiet doubt about whether microbiology was truly my calling.
Then I left academia for a time. I worked as a Medical Sales Representative, travelling through different parts of Nepal. In small district hospitals and maternity wards, I witnessed children dying from cholera, typhoid, and other bacterial infections that were preventable with better diagnosis and rational antibiotic use. I saw over-the-counter antibiotic sales without prescriptions. I saw culture methods that could not identify what was killing patients. And I began to understand, slowly and unmistakably, what a well-trained microbiologist could actually do in that setting.
I returned to Kathmandu with a clarity I had not had before. I completed my Master of Science in Medical Microbiology with distinction from Tribhuvan University, Nepal, and I have not looked back.
Academic and Professional Work
I am an Assistant Professor of Microbiology at the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Patan Academy of Health Sciences (PAHS), Lalitpur, Nepal, where I teach clinical microbiology to MBBS and BSc/Bachelor in Nursing/Bachelor in Midwifery students and contribute to research in infectious diseases and antimicrobial resistance.
My research interests include host-pathogen interaction, immune defense mechanisms, and microbial drug resistance, particularly as these apply to diagnostic and therapeutic decisions in resource-limited settings.
Publications
Book Chapter
Acharya T, Hare J. Sabouraud Agar and Other Fungal Growth Media. In: Gupta VK, Tuohy M, editors. Laboratory Protocols in Fungal Biology: Current Methods in Fungal Biology. 2nd ed. Cham: Springer; 2022. p. 69–86. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83749-5
Journal Articles
Acharya T, Tiwari BR, Pokhrel BM. Serodiagnosis of typhoid fever: evaluation of optimal diagnostic cut-off values for the Widal test in a Nepalese population. Journal of Health and Allied Sciences (JHAS). 2013;3(1):27–30.
Acharya T, et al. Transitioning from Traditional Teaching to Problem-Based Learning Facilitation: A Comprehensive Tutor Training Program at Patan Academy of Health Sciences. ResearchGate
Medical Education and PBL
PBL is central to how PAHS trains its future doctors. I am a member of the PBL Committee at PAHS and have been involved in designing and delivering tutor training programs to help faculty transition from traditional didactic teaching to the facilitation-based model that PBL demands. This work has extended beyond PAHS: I conduct PBL facilitation training workshops for faculty at medical colleges and health science academies across Nepal.
The research arising from this work, published above, examines what a structured tutor training program can realistically achieve and where the gaps remain. It is the kind of question that matters to anyone trying to replicate PBL in institutions where all faculty were trained in lecture-based systems.
Conferences and Training
Scientific engagement outside the institution has been a consistent part of my professional life. A full account of these experiences is documented on Microbeonline, but the key events are:
ASM Microbe 2018, Atlanta, USA The American Society for Microbiology's annual meeting is the largest gathering of microbiologists in the world. In 2018, I attended and presented a poster on the 2016 cholera outbreak in Nepal. The conference brought together researchers from over 100 countries across eight scientific tracks including Antimicrobial Agents and Resistance, Clinical and Public Health Microbiology, and Host-Microbe Biology. Attendance was supported by an ASM Student and Postdoctoral Travel Award and a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Travel Award for Scientists from Low and Lower-Middle Income Countries. Read about the experience
22nd International Pathogenic Neisseria Conference (IPNC 2022), Cape Town, South Africa IPNC is the premier specialist conference for research on Neisseria gonorrhoeae and Neisseria meningitidis, covering epidemiology, genomics, vaccine development, host-pathogen interaction, and diagnostics and treatment. The 2022 conference was held at Lagoon Beach Hotel, Cape Town, October 9–14. Sessions I attended included Meningitis in Africa, Antibiotic Resistance and Diagnostics, Gonococcal Vaccines, and Genomics and Gene Regulation. Read about the experience
CBID Summer School in Molecular Phylogenetics, Hanoi, Vietnam (2016) The Computational Biology for Infectious Diseases (CBID) Summer School provided training for students, researchers, and professionals working on infectious diseases, combining conceptual foundations with hands-on data analysis. I participated in the Molecular Phylogenetics track, alongside parallel groups covering metagenomics, population genetics, transmission dynamics, and epidemic forecasting. Read about the experience
How Microbeonline Began
Microbeonline did not start as a project. It started as a habit.
My first blog post was in December 2008, a random thought posted on Blogspot with no particular purpose. I blogged occasionally through 2013, mostly to store study materials I had gathered so I could access them from anywhere. Visitors began to arrive. They left comments. They sent emails saying that a particular explanation had finally made something click for them.
That feedback changed everything.
In May 2016, I launched microbeonline.com as a dedicated clinical microbiology education site, built to serve the visitors who had already found value in what I was writing. The site has grown steadily since, and the core motivation has remained the same: helping students understand not just what microbiology facts say, but why they matter and how to remember them.
In 2016, IDStewardship.com, one of the leading antimicrobial stewardship and infectious disease pharmacy platforms, featured Microbeonline in a one-on-one interview conducted by Timothy P. Gauthier, Pharm.D., BCPS-AQ ID. It remains one of the recognitions I value most, because it came from clinicians who understood what we were trying to build.
Beyond Microbeonline
Blogging has been part of my life since 2008, and over that time I have been involved in educational technology well beyond microbiology.
I co-founded edusanjal.com, Nepal's first comprehensive educational portal and now the country's leading platform for student guidance on college admissions, scholarships, and education news. In 2011, edusanjal was recognised with the World Summit Youth Award in the Education for All category, one of the leading international recognitions for digital innovation in education.
I also co-founded edupatra.com, which covers education news, views, and stories in the Nepali language.
These projects reflect a consistent conviction: that access to accurate, well-organised information changes outcomes. That conviction is as present in a microbiology article for an MBBS/Lab Technology/Nursing student as it is in a scholarship listing for a student in a remote district of Nepal.
Teaching at National College
Alongside my work at PAHS, I guide graduate students pursuing their Masters in Medical Microbiology at National College (NIST), Kathmandu. Teaching at both institutions has deepened my understanding of where students consistently struggle and what kinds of explanations actually move the needle.
A Note on Nisha Rijal
Microbeonline has benefited greatly from the expertise of Nisha Rijal, microbiologist and quality assurance specialist. She served for nearly 12 years as a microbiologist at the National Public Health Laboratory (NPHL), Nepal's national reference laboratory, and continues to work as a consultant microbiologist in international public health. Her contributions to the site reflect the standard of accuracy and clinical rigour that national reference laboratory work demands.
Connect
- Twitter / X: @pathasala
- Microbeonline on Twitter / X: @microbeonline
- Facebook: Bidur Acharya
If you have spotted an error in an article, have a question, or would like to suggest a topic, please use the contact form. Every message is read, and corrections are made promptly. The site is only as good as the people who engage with it honestly.
The views expressed on Microbeonline.com are my own and do not represent those of Patan Academy of Health Sciences or any other institution.