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I am a Senior Consultant at QCRI and consultant with Mercor.

I work on designing machine learning techniques for applied sciences, with a primary focus on computational biology and computational immunology.  Together our team has designed ML-based solutions for various applied science domains, including material sciences, chemistry, biology, and healthcare. 

I am looking to collaborate with M.S. or doctoral students interested in research (top-tier publications) at the intersection of AI + biologics and am open to being an advisor/part of seed/ funded startups working at the intersection of AI + biological sciences (in cancer, infectious and non-communicable diseases).

News:

• I will give a talk at the AI for Science Symposium organized by QCRI and HBKU on January 22nd, 2025.

• Gave Keynote & Panel Talk at AI, Cloud and Precision Health organized by Qatar Precision Health Institute on Nov 2, 2025.

• Became a Strategic Advisor for pre-seed startup Eternal.

• I (Workaholic) was ranked 21 out of 290 teams in the Adaptive Immune Profiling Challenge (AIRR-ML-25) hosted via Kaggle.

• I (Workaholic) was ranked in top 3.5% (81 out of 2,437, Silver Medal) in the JigSaw - Agile Community Rules Classification Challenge 2025 hosted via Kaggle.

• Our team PolyBeasts is ranked in top 2.5% (53 out of 2240, Silver Medal) in the Neurips - Open Polymer Prediction Challenge 2025 hosted via Kaggle.

• Our team Amari from IIT Ropar, Miami Miller School of Medicine, TII and University of Cambridge ranked 4th in the Autoimmune Disease Machine Learning Challenge (Crunch 2).

• Awarded the prestigious "Computing's Top 30 Early Career Professionals" by IEEE Computer Society.

• Section Editor for Journal of Translational Medicine, Medical Bioinformatics Section and elevated to Associate Editor for Frontiers in Medicine and Public Health.

Latest Papers:

• "B-cell epitope prediction in the age of machine learning: advancements and challenges", accepted in Journal of Translational Medicine (IF: 7.5), 2026.

• "A potent NLRP3 inhibitor effective against both MCC950-sensitive and-resistant inflammation", published in Cell Chemical Biology (IF:  7.2), 2025.

• "Ferroptosis-activating metabolite acrolein antagonizes necroptosis and anti-cancer therapeutics", published in Nature Communications (IF: 14.7), 2025.

• "Strategies for Redesigning Withdrawn Drugs to Enhance Therapeutic Efficacy and Safety: A Review", published in WIREs Computational Molecular Science (IF: 16.8), 2025.

• "NLRP12-PANoptosome activates PANoptosis and pathology in response to heme and PAMPs" published in Cell (IF: 67), 2024.

Latest Code:

1. Our web-server, PAMPHLATE, for predicting peptide-HLA binding is available here.

2. Our web-server, VISH-Pred, for protein / peptide toxicity is available here.

3. Our platform for protein property prediction (solubility, crystallization propensity) and drug repurposing solutions using deep learning is available at QCRI ML for Proteins.

4. Our R package "RGBM" (Regularized Gradient Boosting Machines for Inferring Gene Regulatory Networks) is now on CRAN with tutorial on usage.

Past Experience:

• Principal Scientist, Biotechnology Research Center, Technology Innovation Institute (2023-25).

• Senior Research Scientist, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Memphis, TN, U.S.A. (2021-23)

• Research Scientist at Qatar Computing Research Institute, Doha, Qatar (2018-21) [U.S. equivalent Assistant Professor]

• Post-doc at Qatar Computing Research Institute, Doha, Qatar (2016-18)

In another life, I finished my doctorate with Summa Cum Laude with congratulations of Board of Examiners at KU Leuven, Belgium under the guidance of Prof. Johan Suykens. My goal was to obtain a deep understanding of sparsity in large-scale (Big Data) machine learning and data mining. During my doctorate, I was interested in developing new data-driven kernel-based models for network analysis, supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised learning, and data visualization through optimization-based techniques.