Rehan Akbani

Dr. Rehan Akbani is a Professor at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center's Department of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. He leads bioinformatics analysis and quality control efforts for large-scale cancer genomics projects like The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and Center for Cancer Genomics (CCG), with a focus on proteomic analysis via Reverse-Phase Protein Arrays (RPPA) and mitigating batch effects in molecular datasets. He is Principal Investigator (PI) on multiple NCI and DoD grants, including gastric cancer biomarker research and TCGA-driven pan-cancer studies of the TGF-beta pathway.

Education: PhD in Bioinformatics from University of Texas at San Antonio (2009). Research focuses on integrating genomic, proteomic, and clinical data to uncover cancer mechanisms, with expertise in data quality assurance and pathway analysis. Leads projects comparing gastric cancer to other gastrointestinal malignancies and studying molecular aberrations in gynecologic cancers.

Key contributions include foundational work in TCGA's proteomic data pipelines and pioneering quality control frameworks for large-scale cancer datasets. His lab trains students in advanced bioinformatics, genomic data analysis, and translational research methodologies.