I am a third-year Ph.D. student in the Computer Science program at the University of Waterloo, working under the supervision of Dr. Lila Kari. I completed my B.Sc. in Computer Engineering at Amirkabir University of Technology and my M.Sc. in Computer Engineering at Sharif University of Technology. During my Master's, my research focused on utilizing Deep Neural Networks, particularly Graph Neural Networks, for cancer-related gene classification.

Currently, my research encompasses two primary areas:

Genomic Signatures Analysis: This project focuses on analyzing genomic signatures in extremophile genomes. Our results reveal significant environment-related signatures, likely driven by the extreme conditions these species inhabit. We used various clustering and classification methods, alongside FCGR representations and distance metrics, to achieve this. Our research was accepted at the EMGS Conference 2024 for a poster presentation, and is currently available on bioRxiv.  

Biodiversity Analysis: I am a member of BIOSCAN-ml team, working on biodiversity analysis using transformer-based models, leveraging the BOLD Database to explore insect diversity on Earth. Our work BarcodeBERT was featured in a poster presentation at NeurIPS 2023 and is available on arXiv. My second work BarcodeMAE was presented at ICLR 2025 and is available on arXiv.

Research Interests:

  • Machine Learning and Deep Learning applications in genomics analysis
  • Representation learning
  • Biodiversity analysis
 
Awards: