Fatemeh Vafaee

Associate Professor Fatemeh Vafaee is a leading researcher at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), holding appointments as Associate Professor in the School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences (BABS) and Deputy Director (Science) of the UNSW AI Institute. She previously served as Deputy Director of the UNSW Data Science Hub (uDASH) and has held academic positions at the University of Toronto and the University of Sydney.

• PhD in Artificial Intelligence from University of Illinois at Chicago
• Postdoctoral Fellowships at University of Toronto and University of Sydney
• Founded the AI-Enhanced Biomedicine Laboratory in 2017

Her research focuses on deploying advanced AI techniques to address biomedical challenges through:

• Biomarker Discovery for cancer and neurodegenerative diseases
• Single-Cell Multi-Omics data integration and analysis
• Computational Drug Repositioning and network pharmacology
• Multi-Omics Data Fusion and temporal network modeling

Recent publications demonstrate expertise in liquid biopsy development, single-cell imaging, and AI-driven cancer diagnostics. Her methodological contributions include novel deep learning architectures for omics data analysis and graph neural networks for drug synergy prediction.

Scientific accolades include:

• Winner, Women in AI Asia-Pacific Health Award (2023)
• Runner-Up, WAI-APAC Innovator of the Year (2023)
• Top 10 Women in AI in Asia-Pacific (2023)
• Australian Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Society Research Excellence Award (2023)

She supervises PhD candidates across computational biomedicine and AI in healthcare, with significant grant achievements exceeding $17M in competitive funding, including schemes from ARC Discovery, NHMRC, and Medical Research Future Fund.