Hi, I'm Asif.

I'm a PhD fellow in Virginia Tech's Department of Biological Sciences, using machine learning to study phylo-oncology, genomics, and bioinformatics. My PhD research spans two directions so far: categorizing ghost and sampled introgression in phylogenetic data, and analyzing DNA methylation patterns for cancer cell classification.

During my Master's, I modeled the cell cycle as a boolean network of protein interactions, with a scoring algorithm that identifies which perturbations disrupt or improve it — published in PLOS One. I hold an MS in Computer Science (Data Analytics & AI) from Virginia Tech and a BS in Computer Science & Engineering (minor in Bioinformatics) from Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT).

Before research, I spent three years in industry — as a Software Engineer at Ericsson and a Product Engineer at Seclore — building automation and cloud-native systems, including a rule-based analysis engine that processed 30GB of network data daily and an automated AWS deployment pipeline that cut customer onboarding from days to hours. I still enjoy both sides of that work: I keep building on the computational biology side through my PhD, and I build side projects in my spare time spanning generative AI, computer vision, and web development.