He is a professor of entomology and England manager at invertebrate conservation charity Buglife, and is an expert in crickets and bushcrickets (katydids).
[8] His team also discovered a cricket species Platycleis affinis in which the testes accounted for 14% of the insect's body mass, the largest percentage of any animal at the time of the study.
[9] Vahed is involved in conservation of rare orthopterans and monitors the rare scaly cricket (Pseudomogoplistes vicentae) on the UK mainland[5] as well as on the Channel Islands including a potential new colony of the species on Guernsey.
[11][12] On Guernsey he performs surveys of the cricket with volunteers from La Societe Guernesiaise.
[5] In 2014 Vahed was interviewed on BBC Four television documentary Spider House by Tim Cockerill,[14] in 2019 he appeared on The British Garden: Life And Death On Your Lawn with Chris Packham.