Mohammed Alser

Ph.D. in Computer Engineering (IEEE Turkey Doctoral Dissertation Award), Bilkent University (Turkey), 2018

Computational Genomics Summer Institute (CGSI), University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Summer of 2016 & 2017

M.Sc. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS (Malaysia), 2013

B.Sc. in Computer Engineering, Islamic University of Gaza (Palestine), 2010

His primary research incorporates several aspects of bioinformatics, metagenomics, computational genomics, and computer science. His research aims to enable efficient computational genomic analyses by rethinking the complete compute stack, starting from how we handle input data and algorithms to the underlying hardware architecture. Such a multifaceted approach is necessary to overcome bottlenecks throughout different genomic methods and applications. He is particularly interested in building new data structures, algorithms, software tools, and hardware architectures for enabling and incorporating efficient computational genomic analyses into clinical practice for rapid surveillance of disease outbreaks, diagnosis of genetic disorders, and identification of pathogens and microbiomes on Earth and in challenging environments such as in outer space.

Mohammed Alser is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Bioinformatics and Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science, within the College of Arts and Sciences, at Georgia State University, USA. His primary research incorporates several aspects of bioinformatics, metagenomics, computational genomics, and computer science. His research aims to enable efficient computational genomic analyses by rethinking the complete compute stack, starting from how we handle input data and algorithms to the underlying hardware architecture. Such a multifaceted approach is necessary to overcome bottlenecks throughout different genomic methods and applications. He is particularly interested in building new data structures, algorithms, software tools, and hardware architectures for enabling and incorporating efficient computational genomic analyses into clinical practice for rapid surveillance of disease outbreaks, diagnosis of genetic disorders, and identification of pathogens and microbiomes on Earth and in challenging environments such as in outer space.
Altogether, his work, along with his lab members and collaborators, has resulted in a healthy number of top-tier research papers published in journals like Nature Methods, Nature Protocols, Genome Biology, and Bioinformatics, and proceedings of ISCA, ASPLOS, MICRO, and HPCA conferences. His teaching experiences have a truly international flavor, with more than 14 years of teaching at different top universities on different continents. He has been fortunate to serve as a research advisor to more than 40 students (at postdoctoral, doctoral, master's, and Bachelor levels) and interns at ETH Zürich, CMU, and Bilkent University. He serves the academic community as a keynote speaker, lecturer, program committee member, reviewer, and examiner at several top-tier international venues.
He obtained his PhD in Computer Engineering in August 2018 from Bilkent University, Turkey. Since then, he has been with ETH Zürich, starting as a postdoctoral research associate at the SAFARI research group. Then, as a Lecturer and Senior Researcher in February 2019, he led the bioinformatics research in the same group and taught courses in the broad areas of bioinformatics and computer engineering. In June 2024, he joined the University of Southern California (USC) as a visiting researcher at MangulLab. Before obtaining his PhD, he worked at ZarLab at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), CfAED Lab at TU Dresden, and PETRONAS.