Dr. Vineet Bafna

Biography

Vineet Bafna, a Professor at the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute at UC San Diego, specializes in bioinformatics, with a focus on identifying and characterizing complex structural variations in tumor genomes. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Pennsylvania State University in 1994, where his dissertation addressed theoretical problems in genome rearrangements, introducing the breakpoint graph as a crucial analytical tool within this field. His career includes significant postdoctoral work during 1994-1996 funded by the NSF at the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science. From 1999 to 2002, he worked with Celera Genomics as the Director of Informatics Research, being involved in the assembly and annotation of the human genome. Bafna’s research has significantly contributed to the analysis of breakage-fusion-bridge cycles, extrachromosomal DNA, and has led to the identification of genetic signals associated with adaptation and experimental evolution. He has co-authored over 150 research articles published in leading journals in his field. Bafna served as the co-Director for the Bioinformatics and Systems Biology Ph.D. program from 2013 to 2019 and is a founding faculty member of the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute. Moreover, he co-founded two companies, Abterra, LLC and Boundless Bio, Inc., which are oriented toward the analysis of proteogenomic data and targeting extrachromosomal DNA in cancer, respectively. In 2019, he was honored as a fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology.

Research Interests