Mohammed Alser is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Bioinformatics and Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science, within the College of Arts and Sciences, at Georgia State University, USA. His primary research incorporates several aspects of bioinformatics, metagenomics, computational genomics, and computer science. His research aims to enable efficient computational genomic analyses by rethinking the complete compute stack, starting from how we handle input data and algorithms to the underlying hardware architecture. Such a multifaceted approach is necessary to overcome bottlenecks throughout different genomic methods and applications. He is particularly interested in building new data structures, algorithms, software tools, and hardware architectures for enabling and incorporating efficient computational genomic analyses into clinical practice for rapid surveillance of disease outbreaks, diagnosis of genetic disorders, and identification of pathogens and microbiomes on Earth and in challenging environments such as in outer space.

Altogether, his work, along with his lab members and collaborators, has resulted in a healthy number of top-tier research papers published in journals like Nature Methods, Nature Protocols, Genome Biology, and Bioinformatics, and proceedings of ISCA, ASPLOS, MICRO, and HPCA conferences. His teaching experiences have a truly international flavor, with more than 14 years of teaching at different top universities on different continents. He has been fortunate to serve as a research advisor to more than 40 students (at postdoctoral, doctoral, master's, and Bachelor levels) and interns at ETH Zürich, CMU, and Bilkent University. He serves the academic community as a keynote speaker, lecturer, program committee member, reviewer, and examiner at several top-tier international venues.

He obtained his PhD in Computer Engineering in August 2018 from Bilkent University, Turkey. Since then, he has been with ETH Zürich, starting as a postdoctoral research associate at the SAFARI research group. Then, as a Lecturer and Senior Researcher in February 2019, he led the bioinformatics research in the same group and taught courses in the broad areas of bioinformatics and computer engineering. In June 2024, he joined the University of Southern California (USC) as a visiting researcher at MangulLab. Before obtaining his PhD, he worked at ZarLab at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), CfAED Lab at TU Dresden, and PETRONAS.

His PhD thesis is the first in the field that has tackled the difficult co-design of software algorithms and hardware architectures together to accelerate the detection of incorrect DNA sequence mapping by 1-2 orders of magnitude. As such, his PhD thesis received the IEEE Turkey Doctoral Dissertation Award in 2018. He received several international awards for innovation and academic achievements. He received the ETH Zürich Exceptional Performance Award for two consecutive years, the Yasser Arafat Award, the prestigious TÜBITAK doctoral fellowship, and the HiPEAC Collaboration Grant. He was named the Best Palestinian PhD Student in Turkey. He is selected to represent ETH Zürich at the prestigious Global Young Scientists Summit 2022 for Nobel laureates.

Check out the Google Scholar Profile of Mohammed Alser for a full list of our publications.