Rob Patro

Rob Patro is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park, with appointments in UMIACS, Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), and the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (CBCB). He leads research in algorithms, bioinformatics, and high-performance computing, focusing on scalable genomic data analysis tools like Salmon, Alevin, and Mantis. His work addresses challenges in processing petabyte-scale genomic repositories such as the Sequence Read Archive (SRA), developing efficient data structures and algorithms for sequence search and quantification.

Education
- Ph.D., Computer Science, University of Maryland, 2012
- B.S., Computer Science (with honors), University of Maryland, 2006

Research Interests
Dr. Patro’s research spans algorithm design for big data, computational genomics, and bioinformatics tool development. His lab develops methods for transcriptome quantification, single-cell sequencing analysis, and scalable sequence search, emphasizing efficiency and accuracy. Notable tools include Salmon for RNA-seq quantification and Alevin for lightweight mapping of single-cell data.

Scientific Awards
- Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence (2021)

Advising & Grants
- Advised students include Fatemeh Almodaresi (PhD), Jamshed Khan, Jason Fan, Dongze He, and Noor Pratap Singh.
- Received $350K from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (2022) to enhance genomics software tools.

Labs & Teams
Patro’s group collaborates with institutions like Stony Brook University and VMware Research, focusing on distributed indexing and high-performance computing for genomics.