Invited Speaker


Dr. Fahad Saeed

School of Computing and Information Sciences at Florida International Universit, Miami, USA

Talk Title:

Solving Grand Challenges in Proteomics and Neuroscience with High Performance Data Analytics and Machine-Learning models: Progress and Lessons Learned.

Abstract

Big Omics (Genomics, Proteomics, Connectomics) aims to solve grand challenges in medicine such as: detecting and preventing disease in human populations; diagnosing and characterizing mental disorders; search for personalized medicine treatments; and lastly improving the overall health of human population. Unlike traditional applications in computational science and engineering, solving these big data omics problems at scale (and accuracy) often raises new challenges because of the sparsity and missing data, the need for research on scalable algorithms and architectures, and development of machine-learning framework that can make sense of the complex data sets for improved predictions and deductions. In this keynote talk, Saeed will discuss the opportunities in developing high performance computing solutions and machine-learning models for efficient, and timely computations. He will also discuss the progress that we have made, and the lesson learned in massive omics data science especially in proteomics, and neuroscience.

Biography

Fahad Saeed is a Tenured Associate Professor in the School of Computing and Information Sciences at Florida International University (FIU), Miami FL and is the director of Saeed Lab at FIU. Dr. Saeed's research interests are at the intersection of machine-learning, high performance computing and real-world applications, especially in computational biology.


Dr. Saeed has published 90+ peer-reviewed research papers in leading proceedings, and journals, and 1 Book Chapter, edited 4 Conference Proceedings, 3 special issue journals, and 1 Book. His research is supported by highly competitive grants mainly from National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH). He has been awarded over US$ 3.4 million in external research funds - with more than US$ 2.7 million as a PI (since 2015). Out of this he has bought in US$ 2.1 million to CEC and KFSCIS at FIU as a PI (since Aug 2018). He was awarded the NSF Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) Award bestowed to young and promising scientists in the first two years of their tenure-track position. Most recently he was awarded the NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award which is NSF's most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education. His research has been supported by NVIDIA, Intel/Altera, Xilinx, National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH).


Prior to joining FIU, Prof. Saeed was a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Department of Computer Science at Western Michigan University (WMU), Kalamazoo Michigan since Jan 2014. He was tenured and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor at WMU in August 2018. Dr. Saeed was a Post-Doctoral Fellow and then a Research Fellow in the Systems Biology Center at National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda MD from Aug 2010 to June 2011 and from June 2011 to January 2014 respectively. He received his PhD in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in 2010. He has served as a visiting scientist in world-renowned prestigious institutions such as Department of Bio-Systems Science and Engineering (D-BSSE), ETH Zürich, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) and Epithelial Systems Biology Laboratory (ESBL) at National Institutes of Health (NIH) Bethesda, Maryland.


Dr. Saeed has established a global profile as an Independent Researcher and leader in the field, and has been sought as panelist at the National and International funding agencies. These inlucde serving as panelist at various study sections at National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF), NIH NIDDK, National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Department of Energy (DOE), and as International expert and panelist for Croatian Science Foundation (CSF), University of Queensland Diamantina Institute in Australia, Belgium Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.– FNRS), and Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council of Canada. He has served as the program co-chair of the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BICoB) Conference and IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (IEEE BIBM). He is also a founding chair of IEEE Workshop on HPC solutions to Big Data Computational Biology (IEEE HPC-BCB). He also serves on the editorial board of Springer Journal of Network Modeling Analysis in Health Informatics and Bioinformatics, on the Editorial board of Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, and as Associate Editor for Frontiers of Digital Public Health (specialty section of Frontiersin Public Health, Frontiers in ICT and Frontiers in Computer Science). He has served on numerous IEEE/ACM program committees and is peer-reviewer for more than a two dozen journals.


Dr. Saeed is a Senior Member of ACM and also a Senior Member of IEEE. His honors include ThinkSwiss Fellowship (2007,2008), NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship Award (2010), Fellows Award for Research Excellence (FARE) at NIH (2012), NSF CRII Award (2015), WMU Outstanding New Researcher Award (2016), WMU Distinguished Research and Creative Scholarship Award (2018), NSF CAREER Award (2017), FIU KFSCIS Excellence in Applied Research Award (2020). More recently he was recognized as “Top Scholar” in "Research and Creative Activities" by FIU in 2022