Xin Gao promoted to rank of professor

Computational Bioscience Research Center (CBRC) would like to congratulate Xin Gao for being promoted to the rank of Professor, effective January 1, 2021.

Prof. Gao joined KAUST in October 2010 and became a CBRC PI in January 2013. He has since then produced tremendous work in the areas of computational biology, bioinformatics, machine learning, and algorithms.

Dr. Xin Gao is also the Acting Associate Director of the Computational Bioscience Research Center and the lead of the Structural and Functional Bioinformatics Group at KAUST. Prior to joining KAUST, he was a Lane Fellow at Lane Center for Computational Biology in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He earned his bachelor's degree in Computer Science in 2004 from Tsinghua University and his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 2009 from the University of Waterloo.

Dr. Gao's research interest lies at the intersection between computer science and biology. In the field of computer science, he is interested in developing machine-learning theories and methodologies related to deep learning, probabilistic graphical models, kernel methods, and matrix factorization. In the field of bioinformatics, 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 230 papers in the fields of bioinformatics and machine learning. He is the associate editor of Genomics, Proteomics & Bioinformatics, BMC Bioinformatics, and Quantitative Biology, and the guest editor-in-chief of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Methods, and Frontiers in Genetics.