I am currently an Associate Professor in the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University, BC, Canada and the Director of the Bioinformatics Research Lab. My research interests are in computational intelligence and bioinformatics, particularly algorithms for RNA secondary structure prediction and visualization. More recently, I have also made contributions to RNA gene finding and RNA design.


I have been a member of the organizing committee of the IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology in the roles of Publicity Co-Chair (2005-06, 2014), Technical Co-Chair (2007-08), and Program Chair (2009, 2015). I served as Chair of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Bioinformatics and Bioengineering Technical Committee for 2006-2007 and served as the Vice President for Technical Activities of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society for 2008-2009. In addition I have been a member of the IEEE Transactions of NanoBioscience (2008-present) and IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Steering Committees (2008-2012). I am also serving as Associate Editor for three international journals in Computational Intelligence and Bioinformatics including the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (2008-present).

My teaching interests include Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, Artificial Intelligence, and Discrete Mathematics.