Dr. Xin Gao is currently a full professor of computer science in Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering Division at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). He is also the Interim Director of the Computational Bioscience Research Center (CBRC), Deputy Director of the Smart Health Initiative (SHI), and the Lead of the Structural and Functional Bioinformatics (SFB) Group at KAUST. Prior to joining KAUST, he was a Lane Fellow at Lane Center for Computational Biology in School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He earned his bachelor degree in Computer Science in 2004 from Tsinghua University and his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 2009 from University of Waterloo.

Dr Gao’s research interest lies at the intersection between computer science and biology. His group works on building computational models, developing machine learning techniques, and designing efficient and effective algorithms to tackle key open problems along the path from biological sequence analysis, to 3D structure determination, to function annotation, to understanding and controlling molecular behaviors in complex biological networks, and, recently, to biomedicine and healthcare.

He has published more than 300 papers in the fields of bioinformatics and machine learning, with an h-index of 44. He is the leading inventor of over 60 international patents. He is the associate editor of Journal of Translational Medicine, Genomics, Proteomics & Bioinformatics, BMC Bioinformatics, Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, Quantitative Biology, and Complex & Intelligent System, and the guest editor-in-chief of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Methods, and Frontiers in Molecular Bioscience. He has been invited to review research grant proposals for various funding agencies. Sixteen of his former students and postdocs are now independent PIs at leading institutes all over the world.