Touati Benoukraf

Dr. Touati Benoukraf is an Associate Professor in the Division of Biomedical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He holds the Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Bioinformatics for Personalized Medicine and is a Senior Scientist at the Beatrice Hunter Cancer Research Institute (BHCRI). His interdisciplinary research bridges computational and experimental biology to advance personalized medicine through multi-omics data integration.

His research focuses on epigenomic drift, chromatin dynamics, microbiome interactions, and genome instability in disease contexts, particularly cancer. He leads a hybrid wet-and-dry lab that develops and applies cutting-edge bioinformatics tools such as NanoVar, MethMotif 2024, forkedTF, and TFRegulomeR to analyze complex omics datasets. His work leverages high-throughput sequencing and data mining to uncover novel mechanisms in pathogenesis and therapeutic resistance.

The most recent publications reflect a strong trend in multi-omics integration applied to cancer and neurodegenerative diseases, with emphasis on DNA methylation, structural variant detection, chromatin profiling, and tumor microenvironment modeling using organoids. His research spans computational tool development, epigenetic regulation, and translational applications in precision oncology.

• Canada Research Chair in Bioinformatics for Personalized Medicine (Tier 2)
• The Rose M. Patten Graduate Scholarship in Genetics Research (awarded to student Asmaa Mahmoud)

Dr. Benoukraf actively mentors PhD and Master’s students in genetics, neuroscience, and computer science, and supervises postdoctoral fellows. He teaches graduate courses in human genetics, genomics, and bioinformatics at Memorial University and has delivered lectures at institutions such as the National University of Singapore and Université Saint Joseph de Beyrouth. His lab receives funding from major sponsors including the Terry Fox Research Institute and MITACS. He is also involved in national initiatives like the Marathon of Hope Cancer Centres Network.

His laboratory, the Benoukraf Lab, operates as a collaborative, interdisciplinary team comprising postdoctoral researchers, PhD and Master’s students, and professional associates, working on projects ranging from single-cell epigenomics to structural variant analysis in cancer. The lab is active in knowledge dissemination, regularly presenting at international conferences and contributing to open-source bioinformatics resources on GitHub.