[2] He was born on 26 January 1969 in Sylhet District, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), and came to the United Kingdom as a child.
In 2010, he obtained a PhD with a thesis entitled "The role of microarray profiling in predicting outcome in patients with colorectal cancer".
[8] His main clinical interest is colorectal cancer, and he performs surgery for primary and recurrent disease as well as multi-visceral resections.
He teaches innovation and digital transformation for surgeons at Harvard Medical School and Imperial College London.
His online videos have been watched hundreds of thousands of times, earning him the accolade of the most-watched surgeon in human history.
[14] He aims to teach surgery and surgical processes to thousands of students at a time using VR technology.
[15] Ahmed's company Virtual Medics developed the use of wearable technology in education and clinical practice.
In May 2014, using Google Glass, he performed and streamed a live operation to 14 thousand students across 132 countries and 1100 cities.
[17] Through Medical Realities, he aims to provide tutorials in a modular format to teaching hospitals around the world.
[20][21][22][23] His work has been featured on Wired, The Guardian, The Telegraph, ABC News, CNET, The Verge, Huffington Post, and Tech China.
[24][25][26][27][16][28][29][30] On 9 December 2016, he performed the world's first live operation using Snapchat Spectacles where he trained 200 medical students and surgical trainees, which was covered by Time magazine, and BBC.