Professor Mohammad Asif Khan

Abstract

This symposium marks thirty years of bioinformatics at NUS, and across the same three decades the gap between what the tools can do and who can actually use them only widened. Generative AI has made that gap urgent rather than merely chronic. The field has never lacked diagnoses of its training problem. What it has lacked is a sustained process for turning diagnosis into work that somebody owns. A consortium started by APBioNET, now with member organisations across the world, identified seven grand challenges in bioinformatics education and training, and has since moved from naming them to working out what each would take to solve. The seven are held as a living agenda rather than a fixed list, and revised as the field moves.

Speaker Bio

Mohammad Asif KHAN is Professor and Associate Dean of the College of Computing and Information Technology at the University of Doha for Science and Technology (UDST), Qatar. He received his PhD from the National University of Singapore and then joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University (JHU), USA. He was part of the JHU team that set up a collaboration with Perdana University in Malaysia, where he served as Founding Dean of the School of Data Sciences and Founding Director of the Centre for Bioinformatics. He was also a Visiting Professor at Bezmialem Vakif University, Istanbul, under Turkey’s International Fellowship for Outstanding Researchers. Dr Khan has served as President of the Asia-Pacific Bioinformatics Network (APBioNET) for multiple terms, is Chair of the Executive Board of the Global Organisation for Bioinformatics Learning, Education and Training (GOBLET), and is an Honorary Director of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). He was among the organisers of the first InSyB in 2017 and hosted the ninth edition at UDST in 2025. His research focuses on biological data warehousing and on bioinformatics applications to viruses, immune responses, vaccines, drug design and disease biomarkers.