Nizar Drou
Core Bioinformatics Lead Developer
Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: BSc Medical Genetics, MSc Bioinformatics University of Leicester, UK.
Research Areas: Genomics; Bioinformatics; Computational Biology; High Performance Computing; Software Engineering
Nizar received his BSc in Medical Genetics from the University of Leicester in 2004. He then went on to complete an MSc in Bioinformatics from the same university in 2006. Nizar initially started his academic career working on the genome sequencing project for Brassica rapa at the John Innes Centre. He then joined The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC, now the Earlham Institute) in Norwich, where he was responsible for the Sequence Assembly and Analysis team.
In 2014, Nizar joined NYU Abu Dhabi as the Core Bioinformatics Lead Developer within the Center for Genomics and Systems Biology. His focus has been to develop the team and the resources necessary in order to support the multidisciplinary research at NYU Abu Dhabi. He has been leading a diverse team of researchers that have established a genomics infrastructure at NYU Abu Dhabi.
Nizar's research interests broadly span omics applications and high-performance computing. Nizar is very much interested in building genomics analysis applications and modular workflows and leveraging the power of cloud computing in scaling such applications. He is also interested in the applications of machine learning and AI in mutation detection and drug target identification, as well as epidemiology.
Current Research
Currently, I am working on developing further applications for our publicly available analysis and visualization platform at http://nasqar.abudhabi.nyu.edu. Expanding and porting our genomics infrastructure and workflow management system (BioSAILs) on the AWS cloud. Collaborating with the amazing faculty and labs at NYU Abu Dhabi on their exciting research projects!