Waqar Hanif is a Translational Bioinformatics researcher with background in cancer genomics, immunology, neurodegenerative diseases, machine learning, software and pipeline development in bioinformatics. He loves to analyze biological data to ask and try to answer complex biological questions, especially when it comes to inflammatory factors. Moreover, he loves to develop bioinformatics pipeline to analyze large-scale bioinformatics datasets (single-cell transcriptomics, whole-genome sequencing and more) especially in automated and reproducible environments such as NextFlow, Docker, Snakemake and more. He has around a decade of extensive experience in Linux-based systems, Python, R, C++/C# and JAVA (Python is better, he says). He topped his Bachelor's batch in BS Bioinformatics with a thesis in rheumatoid arthritis while his Master's thesis was in data-driven approach to identify immunotherapy targets and immunosuppressive factors in prostate cancer. Additionally, he has developed and published several tools and pipelines for bioinformatics such as easeRNAseq, CompoundHunter, OptimalPDB and fasterStringTie. In MIRACLE, his project focuses on identifying cellular and expression perturbations in Alzheimer's disease and cardiovascular diseases to elucidate the common and driving inflammatory factors involved in both pro-inflammatory disease that can be targeted through therapeutic development. His project mainly focuses on analyzing single-cell RNA-transcriptomics data collected from covering hundreds of Alzheimer's disease cohorts with many different cardiovascular comorbidities, followed by an extensive machine learning-based models to classify patients based on their expression profiles and applying various virtual screening methods to identify therapeutic biomarkers and drugs.

In his private time, he loves to read books about history, loves old architecture, visit old and small towns, read about astronomy and watch documentaries and plays tennis and cricket. Also, he founded his own bioinformatics company, BioCode, in 2020.