Mohammed El-Kebir

Mohammed El-Kebir is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), with affiliate appointments in Electrical & Computer Engineering, the Institute of Genomic Biology, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. His research focuses on combinatorial optimization algorithms for fundamental challenges in cancer genomics and computational biology, particularly tumor phylogenetics, single-cell sequencing data analysis, and metastasis migration history modeling.

• PhD in Computer Science, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (Netherlands) and VU University Amsterdam (2015)
• Postdoctoral training at Brown University and Princeton University (2014-2017)

El-Kebir's work addresses intra-tumor heterogeneity by developing mathematical models to reconstruct evolutionary trees of cancer mutations from mixed sequencing data. His lab has pioneered methods like SPhyR and MACHINA for phylogeny inference under data limitations, and PhyDOSE for optimizing single-cell sequencing experiments. His research bridges computational challenges with clinical implications for personalized medicine and therapy resistance prediction.

Key contributions include:

• Theoretical foundations for cancer phylogenetic problems (hardness proofs, algorithm design)
• Single-cell sequencing algorithms accounting for data sparsity and errors
• Migration graph frameworks for metastasis analysis
• Interactive tools like ClonArch and CNAViz for tumor data visualization

El-Kebir has received multiple accolades including the NSF CAREER Award (2021) and CRII Award (2019). His group has produced 15+ peer-reviewed publications since 2020, with student collaborators securing prestigious fellowships like the NSF GRFP. He actively contributes to conference program committees (RECOMB, ISMB, WABI) and teaches graduate-level courses in Bioinformatics and Computational Cancer Genomics.