PhD in Genetics, Genomics & Bioinformatics (State University of New York at Buffalo)
Bioinformatician | Computational Biologist | Bioinformatics Scientist
I’m a bioinformatician with 10+ years of experience in computational genomics, developing and implementing reproducible multi-omics pipelines, and applying machine learning to large-scale regulatory genomics data.
My work spans RNA-seq, epigenomics and microbiome, with a strong background in genetics, epigenetics, and developmental biology.
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User Support Bioinformatician, ENA @ The European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI)(Sept 2026 - present)
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Bioinformatician, Mercor (Formerly Sepal AI (Aug 2025 – July 2026))
Building reproducible RNA-seq / microbiome / multi-omics pipelines for AI model benchmarking and packaging workflows into standardized evaluation tasks. -
Adjunct Lecturer, NUST (Jul 2024 – May 2025)
Designed and delivered lectures in computational biology, improving course outcomes and mentoring students in bioinformatics applications.
PhD, Genetics, Genomics & Bioinformatics, State University of New York at Buffalo (2023)
- Built a bioinformatics pipeline to evaluate enhancer-prediction tools using machine-learning algorithms, resulting in a BMC Bioinformatics publication.
- Applied SCRMshaw, machine learning algoorithm, to annotate enhancers across 33 insect species, expanding regulatory element annotations in under-represented genomes.
- Contributed to multi-institutional collaborations leading to multiple peer-reviewed publications.
- Analyzed chromatin accessibility data—ChIP-seq, FAIRE-seq, ATAC-seq, and single-cell ATAC-seq (scATAC-seq)—to advance understanding of regulatory genomics.
- Mentored junior researchers, established SOPs, and provided bioinformatics support to wet-lab collaborators (data analysis and figure generation in R).
- Presented findings at 7+ national and international conferences, communicating complex bioinformatics concepts to diverse audiences.
- Computational enhancer prediction: evaluation and improvements. BMC Bioinformatics (2019)
- Annotating the insect regulatory genome. Insects (2021)
- Regulatory genome annotation of 33 insect species. eLife (2024)
- Mechanisms of transcriptional regulation in Anopheles gambiae. Proc. R. Soc. B (2024)
- SCRMshaw: Supervised cis-regulatory module prediction for insect genomes. PLOS ONE (2024)
_For a full list, see my [Google Scholar]https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=_BAFDOEAAAAJ&hl=en
- Arrived at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2017 as a Fulbright Foreign Student Fellow, becoming one of the first Pakistani scholars in bioinformatics at UB.
- Featured in UB Biochemistry News: “Bioinformatics Student Earns Fulbright Fellowship”
- Profiled in UB’s Faces & Voices series for my Phd in Bioinformatics.
- Programming: Python, R, Shell/Bash
- Bioinformatics Tools: Snakemake, bedtools, samtools, bwa, MACS2, HOMER, MEME suite, BLAST, CLUSTAL, UniProt, RShiny
- NGS & Multi-omics: RNA-seq, scRNA-seq, ATAC-seq, ChIP-seq, FAIRE-seq
- Databases & Systems: MySQL, Linux/Unix, HPC (Slurm), Git
- Fulbright Fellowship Award – Master’s in the USA (2017-2019)
- Chancellor’s Roll of Honor, University of Mississippi (2015)
- UGRAD Exchange Program, United States Education Foundation in Pakistan (2015)
I’m passionate about mentoring early-career scientists, and translating complex bioinformatics concepts into accessible insights.
When I’m not working with data, I enjoy exploring intersections of AI and genomics and contributing to open-source science.
- Email: hasiba.asma@gmail.com
- GitHub: github.com/HasibaAsma
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/hasibaasma
- Google Scholar: scholar.google.com/citations?user=_BAFDOEAAAAJ&hl=en