Vineet Bafna

I am a Professor of Computer Science & Engineering and the HDSI Chancellor’s Professor III of the Halicioğlu Data Science Institute at UC San Diego.

In a past life, I was a senior investigator at SmithKline Beecham and Director of Informatics Research at Celera Genomics participating in the sequence assembly and annotation of the human genome. At UC San Diego, I served as the Director of the Bioinformatics and Systems Biology Ph.D. program from 2013-19.

My research focuses on identifying mechanisms of complex genome rearrangements in cancer, with a specific focus on ecDNA. I have also contributed to the identification of genetic signals of adaptation in human populations and in experimentally evolving organisms, and to the identification of mutated and modified proteomes through proteogenomics. I am the scientific co-founder of two companies: Abterra, Inc., which develops services and products relating to antibody analysis and proteomics, and Boundless Bio, Inc., which is targeting extrachromosomal DNA in cancer. I am an elected fellow of the International Society of Computational Biology (2019), and an ACM fellow (2023) .