Bioinformatics Research Group

PIs: Giri Narasimhan; Trevor Cickovski; Kalai Mathee; Ananda Mondal;

The Bioinformatics Research Group (BioRG) in the School of Computing and Information Sciences, at Florida International University (FIU), is a multi-discipliary research group headed by Prof. Giri Narasimhan. The group works on problems from the fields of Bioinformatics, Machine Learning, Biotechnology, Data Mining, Visualization, Software Engineering, and more. The group's research projects include Microbiome Data Analysis, Epigenetics, Antibiotics resistance, Software Engineering, Visualization, Cancer Informatics, Electronic Health Records, Comparative Genomics of Bacterial genomes, Genomic databases, Pattern Discovery in sequences and structures, prediction of regulatory elements, primer design, probe design, phylogenetic analysis, medical image processing, image analysis, data integration, data mining, information retrieval, and more. The current focus of this research group is the development of tools and techniques for state-of-the-art Multi-omic Integrative Analysis.

Recent Exciting Research from this group includes:

  • Longitudinal multi-omic microbiome analysis (Ruiz-Perez et al., mSystems, 2021)
  • Causal inferencing in microbiomes (Sazal et al., BMC Genomics, 2020; Sazal et al., Scientific Reports, 2021)
  • Effect of metronidazole on vaginal microbiota associated with asymptotic bacterial vaginosis (Ruiz-Perez, Access Microb, 2021)
  • "So You Think You Can PLS-DA" (Ruiz-Perez et al., BMC Bioinformatics, 2020)
  • ADHD microbiome (Cickovski et al., J Medical Microb, 2020)
  • Alpha-1 lung microbiome (Cickovski et al., book chapter, 2020)
  • Visualizing microbiome profiles (Valdes et al., under review, 2020)
  • Longitudinal microbiome analysis (Ruiz-Perez et al., Microbiome, 2019)
  • Scalable microbiome profiling (Valdes et al., ISMB and Bioinformatics, 2019)
  • Lightweight Microbiome Analysis pipeline PluMA (Cickovski et al., 2018)

Four PhD Dissertations in 2020-21


Camilo Valdes

Daniel Ruiz-Perez

Musfiqur Sazal

Farzana Yusuf

FIU Top Scholar Award 2021


Prof. Giri Narasimhan

FIU Faculty Senate Award 2022

Excellence in Mentoring and Advising


Prof. Giri Narasimhan


Recent Publications

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Latest software

Check out: PALM for analyzing multi-omic longitudinal data from microbiome studies; Flint for large-scale microbiome profiling on the cloud; and PluMA -- our pipeline for Plugin-Based Microbiome Analysis Read More

Recorded Talks