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I will be joining QCRI as a Senior Scientist (U.S. Equivalent Associate Professor) and focus on extracting meaningful biology via biomedical LLMs.

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. and 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 and infectious diseases).

News:

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

• 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).

• Our team Patho_omics from IIT Ropar, TII ranked in top 10% (34 out of  355 teams) in the Global AI Hackathon 2025 by Elucidata via Kaggle.

• 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.

• PC Member: IEEE BIBM 2020-25

Latest Papers:

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• "Strategies for Redesigning Withdrawn Drugs to Enhance Therapeutic Efficacy and Safety: A Review", published in WIREs Computational Molecular Science (IF: 16.8), 2025.

• "Benchmarking protein language models for protein crystallization", published in Nature Scientific Reports, 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 web server for protein property prediction and drug repurposing solutions using deep learning is available here.

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

Past Experience:

• Director of Computational Biology, 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.