Extrachromosomal DNA and Cancer

Bio

Vineet Bafna, Ph.D, is a Bioinformatics researcher and a Professor of Computer Science and the Halicioglu Data Science Institute at UC San Diego. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from The Pennsylvania State University in 1994 working on theoretical problems in genome rearrangements. His introduction of the breakpoint graph as an analytical tool has been an important driver of the field. After an NSF funded postdoctoral research at the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, Bafna was a senior investigator at SmithKline Beecham, conducting research on DNA signaling, target discovery and EST assembly. From 1999 to 2002, he worked at Celera Genomics, ultimately as director of Informatics Research, participating in the assembly and annotation of the human genome.  Vineet Bafna’s research focuses cancer genomics and population genetics. He has made important contributions in the analysis of breakage fusion bridge cycles, extrachromosomal DNA, identifying the genetic signals of adaptation, analyzing experimental evolution, and proteogenomics. He has co-authored over 150 research articles in the leading journals in the field. He served as co-Director of the Bioinformatics and Systems Biology Ph.D. program from 2013-19, and was founding faculty of the Halicioglu Data Science Institute at UCSD. He has co-founded two companies: Abterra, LLC, which focuses on services and products relating to proteogenomic data, and Boundless Bio, Inc., which is targeting extrachromosomal DNA in cancer. In 2019, he was selected as a fellow of the International Society of Computational Biology.