Arif Harmanci

Dr. Arif Harmanci is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioinformatics and Systems Medicine at UTHealth Houston. He holds a PhD and MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rochester, and a BS from Bilkent University. His research focuses on computational biology, including functional genomics, non-coding RNA modeling, cancer genomics, and genomic privacy preservation. Dr. Harmanci has contributed to major consortia such as ENCODE and modENCODE, and pioneered methods for secure genomic data analysis. His work addresses ethical challenges in sharing genomic data while advancing precision medicine applications.

Education:

• PhD, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Rochester (2010)
• MS, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Rochester (2005)
• BS, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Bilkent University (2004)

Research Interests: Dr. Harmanci’s work spans computational methods for next-generation sequencing analysis, functional genomics, and privacy-preserving bioinformatics tools. He explores how genomic data privacy can be maintained during clinical analysis and sharing, developing frameworks like FSLearning and COLLAGENE. His cancer genomics research includes meningioma classification, glioma immunology, and the molecular mechanisms driving tumor progression.

Publications: Over 100 peer-reviewed articles, including high-impact journals like Nature and Science. Recent work emphasizes federated learning for medical data, secure genomic imputation, and single-cell tumor profiling.

Grants & Collaborations: Key member of ENCODE and 1000 Genomes Project. Involved in interdisciplinary projects at Yale University and UTHealth Houston, focusing on translational bioinformatics and computational oncology.