Contact
Associate Professor, ENG Biomedical Engineering
- jabbari@ualberta.ca
Overview
Area of Study / Keywords
RNA Bioinformatics Computational biology RNA therapy RNA structure-function characterization
About
I am an Associate Professor of computational biology/bioinformatics at the Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Alberta and the Director of Computational Biology Research and Analytics Laboratory (COBRA Lab). I am interested in finding the underlying mechanisms of human diseases with a transcriptomic lens. I have an extensive background in predicting complex structure of RNA and utilizing it for therapeutics. My past projects include numerous RNA structure prediction projects and their application in breast cancer luminal type identification using RNA-seq, identification of optimal oligonucleotide for exon skipping treatment of Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and differential gene expression analysis for stem cell to endothelial vs. neuronal cells. I am currently interested in RNA-RNA and RNA-protein interaction mechanism and their implication on human diseases, as well as understanding the process of aging.
Research
Our Mission: Help diagnose and cure human diseases by developing novel diagnostics and RNA therapeutics through research using techniques from bioinformatics, machine learning, data science and computational genomics.
Focus: RNA, transcriptomics, RNA-RNA interaction, RNA-protein interaction, RNA therapy, Understanding Aging process and disease progression are focus of our group, alongside explainable machine learning with applications in medicine.
Network: We have a large network of members and collaborators around the world.
You can find more information about the group at COBRA Lab webpage