Bahman Afsari, Ph.D.
- Center for Cancer Research
- National Cancer Institute
- Building 10, Room 6N110
- Bethesda, MD 20892-1868
- 240 858 7575
- bahman.afsari@nih.gov
RESEARCH SUMMARY
Dr. Afsari is a Staff Scientist in the HIV/AIDS Malignancy Branch. He is an expert in Bioinformatics, Biostatistics, Machine Learning, and Dynamical Systems Theory. His main area of research is the data analysis of genomics, epigenomics, and clinical data related to Cancers associated with Viruses and the development of bioinformatics pipelines to analyze such data.
Areas of Expertise
Bahman Afsari, Ph.D.
Biography
Bahman Afsari, Ph.D.
Dr. Afsari received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 2013 under the supervision of Dr. D. Geman, working on white-box machine learning methods for cancer biomarker discovery from transcriptomics data. He joined Dr. E.J. Fertig's lab as a postdoc from 2013-2016, working on heterogeneity analysis of the genomic data to study different problems of cancer problems, e.g., single-cell gene set analysis and alternative splicing detection. From 2016-2020, he joined Dr. C. Tomasetti’s lab first as a postdoc and later as a junior faculty where he worked on biomarker discovery to predict phenotypes from genomics, e.g., early cancer detection from liquid biopsy, and assess carcinogenic effects on DNA from genomic landscape. From 2020 to 2023, he worked for two companies, Freenome and Guardant Health, as a Senior Computational Biologist, working in developing and validating NGS blood tests. These two companies were the first to have successful clinical trials for blood-based tests for the early detection of Colorectal cancer.