Alex Feltus

Alex Feltus is a Professor in the Department of Genetics and Biochemistry at Clemson University's College of Science. He also serves as Core Faculty in the Biomedical Data Science and Informatics program and as a Faculty Member at the Clemson Center for Human Genetics. With a Ph.D. in Cell Biology from Vanderbilt University (2000) and a B.Sc. in Biochemistry from Auburn University (1992), Feltus has established himself as a leading researcher at the intersection of computational biology and genomics.

His research spans artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, cyberinfrastructure, high-performance & cloud computing, systems biology, tumor genomics, medical genetics, crop genetics, genome assembly, systems genetics, and paleogenomics. His work focuses on revealing genomic mechanisms underlying phenotype expression, with particular emphasis on identifying biomarker systems that distinguish between biological states such as normal versus tumor tissues.

Feltus's laboratory employs software engineering and computational biology techniques to make molecular discoveries in both human and plant biological systems. They develop elastic advanced compute systems for robust genomics workflows, enabling small labs to perform innovative petascale computational biology. His recent publications demonstrate a strong focus on gene expression analysis, genome assembly, Neanderthal DNA studies, plant genomics (particularly oak and Medicago), and AI applications in genetic research.

Among his achievements are the development of open source software, completion of multiple NSF grants, and training of numerous undergraduate, master's, and doctoral students. He is also the co-founder of Praxis AI LLC, through which he extends his 27 years of bioscience research experience to scale computational biology skilling to thousands of learners worldwide via virtual courses, biohackathons, podcasts, and digital learning solutions.

Feltus teaches several courses including Bioinformatics, Medical Bioinformatics, Advanced Medical Bioinformatics, Digital Biology, Computational Genomics, Biomedical Informatics, Next-Generation Sequence Analysis, and Perl for Bioinformatics.