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Welcome to the Oncinfo Lab!


Oncinfo is a research lab at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio . The focus of our projects is on bioinformatics and computational biology. We develop and apply sophisticated machine learning algorithms to analyze large biological, or clinical, data sets. From these complex data, our goal is to infer useful information which provides insight into biology, or leads to clinical applications. Oncinfo contributes to neuroscience through collaboration with The Glenn Biggs Institute for Alzheimer's & Neurodegenerative Diseases. Also, several cancer research projects are defined in collaboration with the Department of Cell Systems and Anatomy. Our external collaboration include the British Columbia Cancer Agency, which has a great research reputation in oncology around the world. Oncinfo welcomes further collaborators from related disciplines such as medicine, molecular and cellular biology, pharmacology, computer science, and statistics. We are particularly interested in collaboration with R&D departments of top pharmaceutical companies.


List of projects

Current and former lab members

cave2017.jpgCave 2017

  1. Dr. Habil Zare (the PI, CV, lab notebook)
  2. Shuvabrata Saha (graduate student, left in 2014)
  3. Rupesh Agrahari (graduate student, graduated in 2016, Update: Software Developer at Crossvale Inc in Dallas)
  4. Amir Foroushani (Postdoctoral Associate until 2016, Update: Computer Scientist at Laboratory of Immunology, NIAID, NIH)
  5. Vignesh Kuppa (volunteer graduate student, left in 2015)
  6. Jessica Zavadil (MD/PhD student in Dr. Christi Walter's lab at UTHSCSA, graduated in 2016)
  7. Aamir Zainulabadeen (Visiting undergraduate student in summers 2016 and 2017 from Princeton University)
  8. Philip Yao (Visiting undergraduate student in summer 2016 from the University of Michigan)
  9. Hanie Samimi (graduate student, graduated in 2018. Update: PhD student at Texas State University)
  10. Bryan Shaw (graduate student, left in 2017)
  11. Gabriel Hurtado (undergraduate student 2016-2017)
  12. Allison Yang (2017 Summer Camp high school student)
  13. Angela Zhang (2017 Summer Camp high school student)
  14. Shilpita Mitra-Behura (2017 Summer Camp high school student)
  15. Ghazal Ebrahimi (Volunteer undergraduate student from Sharif University)
  16. Isha Mehta (Postdoctoral Associate)
  17. Meghan Short (Guest postdoc)

Open positions

Research assistantship and postdoctoral opportunities are available in the Oncinfo Lab. See the 2018 [pdf] and 2019 [pdf ] advertisements for more details on the postdoctoral position, and also if you are interested in joining the lab as a graduate student. PhD applicants must be strong in machine learning and knowledgeable in molecular biology to be successful in multidisciplinary research as illustrated in our exemplar papers. There are also some opportunities to apply for postdoctoral fellowship awards. Taking an R test is essential in the interview process.


Computational resources

To run our in silico experiments, we use resources provided by The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) e.g., Lonestar , which is a computing system with over 30,00 cores, and Stampede, which is one of the 10 top supercomputers in the world with 10 petaFLOPS dedicated to scientific research. We have also access to NSF-supported ​XSEDE recourses including Jetstream.


Educational services

The “Bioinformatics for biologist workshop” is a practical introduction to some basic bioinformatics tools for audience with little computational skills. Slides are available from the workshop page. Additional resources are listed at “How to begin learning bioinformatics?”

How to

Please feel free to use and contribute to our How to page, which is a list of miscellaneous solutions for data analysis and other challenges in computational biology.

For members


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