Mahmudur Rahman Hera

See my full CV here.

I am a PhD student at Penn State. My supervisor is Professor David Koslicki. Our lab focuses on solving problems in biology using mathematics and computational resources, particularly on metagenomics applications. I am particularly inclined to develop fast and efficient programs to process large-scale biological data and answer questions. I have developed fast, efficient, and memory-light programs to (a) estimate average nucleotide identity (ANI) for multiple sequences (see mrcc and its paper), (b) to compute fingerprints of DNA data (see frac-kmc and its paper), and (c) to obtain functional annotations from a metagenomic sample (see fmh-funcprofiler and its paper). My works have been accepted and presented in prestigious conferences, such as RECOMB, WABI, and ECCB. Some of these have been adopted in larger-scale open-source projects, and are part of production-level impactful programs.

Before starting my PhD in 2021, I completed my Master's in CS from CSE, BUET in 2020. In my Master's thesis, I worked with Dr. Atif Rahman to develop a reference-free method to design personalized guide RNAs from CRISPR experiments. I completed my graduation from CSE, BUET in 2017. My undergraduate thesis supervisor was Dr. Yusuf Sarwar Uddin. We designed and developed an adaptive IoT platform that is able to operate remotely under a constrained 3G data budget.

I am happily married, and a father to a baby girl. In my free time, I love to play table tennis and pool. I also love to solve shape-shifting Rubik's-like puzzles. I am also an amateur guitarist, I spend a lot of my free time studying music theory.