About myself

I completed my Ph.D. in 2006 in Computer Science at Carleton University, School of Computer Science, Ottawa, Canada, in Information retrieval and Syntactic Pattern Recognition. I finished my degree with high honor and I was the winner of the university Senate Medal for outstanding research achievements. My Ph.D. Thesis included a lot of applications in Bioinformatics for searching and storing DNA sequences. In 2006- 2007, I worked as a research associative at the National Research Council (NRC) of Canada for the language technology group in Gatineau, Canada, in the field of Machine Translation. There, I was able to apply a lot of the techniques that I developed during my Ph.D. In 2007, I won the prestigious NSREC Postdoctoral Fellowship in Canada. In 2007-2011, I worked as a Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada, where I conducted my research in the field of Bio-informatics and more specifically in Genome Rearrangement projects. Concurrently, I worked in another research project, where it involves processing of interacting RNAs. The project should result in a tool for muti-pattern processing in multi-sequences, which should have great benefits for computer scientists and biologists working in the field. Every single work was highly recognized and published in high rank journals and conferences such as ACM, IEEE, the Computer Journal, the PAA journal, and BMC Algorithms for Molecular Biology. Writing and documenting research achievements need a lot of experience and skills. I acquired these skills by being totally involved in writing my grant applications, patent application, posters, presentations, and all my paper publications. My paper published in the Computer Journal was the winner of the Wilkes paper award in 2006 and was cited as the Most Meritorious.

 Also, during the last few years, I was able to develop my experience in university teaching by taking courses in theory and practice of university teaching, teaching courses, and attending a lot of workshops. I taught courses in Bio-informatics, data structures, discrete structures 1 and II, and algorithm analysis and design. I also developed a course design for formal language theory.

Research interests

Bioinformatics: Genome Rearrangement, Sorting by Reversals, Motif finding for RNA secondary structures, RNA-RNA secondary structure interaction.

Pattern Recognition: Syntactic Pattern Recognition (PR), Approximate String Matching (ASM), Efficient Sequence Alignment techniques for dictionary-based models, Exact String Matching.

Artificial Intelligence: Search techniques, Blind Search, Heuristic Search, Branch and Bound techniques.

Advanced Data Structures: The design and analysis of many advanced data structures, Designing and implementing algorithms that use these advanced data- structures. Most data structures used or updated are used for storing strings and sequences. Design an efficient data structure for storing and retrieving Genome data. Self-adjusting data structures.

Information Retrieval: The design and analysis of information retrieval algorithms, Self-adjusting search techniques. Update these algorithms to be used efficiently for strings.

Machine learning and Machine Translation: Phrase-based statistical machine translation, decoding techniques, filtering techniques for models, learning techniques for optimizing weights in log-linear models..

Database: Relational and Object Oriented Databases.

Please refer to my CV for a complete overview about my background and research interests.