Dr. Vineet Bafna

Biography

Vineet Bafna is a Professor at the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, specializing in Computational Molecular Biology, Bioinformatics, and Proteomics. He has made significant contributions to the field of bioinformatics, particularly relating to genome rearrangements, RNA structure, gene finding, and mass spectrometric data analysis. He was instrumental in introducing the breakpoint graph technique, a method widely used for analyzing genome rearrangements. His key work in computational proteomics led to the development of an efficient scoring function for protein identification that accounts for ion fragmentation and instrument error. Bafna also led a team at Celera that created a toolkit for the identification and quantification of the proteome using mass spectrometry. He focuses on the computational analysis of peptide mass spectra and their applications in protein function, particularly analyzing single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) and their relevance in therapeutics and diagnostics. Bafna has developed multiple toolkits for analyzing peptide sequences and genomic data, including the Conserved Exon Method for gene finding and SCOPE DiffXPro for protein quantification. He joined the UCSD faculty on July 1, 2003, after seven years in the biosciences industry, and has held a variety of roles, including a post-doctoral researcher at the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, and Senior Investigator at SmithKline Beecham. He has received a B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University.

Research Interests

Experience