About Me

I’m a final-year Ph.D. candidate in the Durrant Lab at the University of Pittsburgh, working in computational structural biology and machine learning for drug discovery. I’m now seeking industry roles in computational drug discovery, ML for chemistry, and cheminformatics / scientific software. Here is how I got here.

Journey
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2017

Education

Entered Zewail City of Science and Technology

Giza, Egypt

Began undergraduate studies in Biomedical Sciences, drawn to the overlap of biology and computation.

Transition

Declared Computational Biology & Genomics

Giza, Egypt

Committed to computational approaches over traditional wet-lab work.

Research

Undergraduate genomics projects

Giza, Egypt

Built genomics tools from scratch in R, Python, and C++ — SNP calling, a diabetes SNP detector, a UPGMA tree builder, and a genomic-mismatch pipeline.

Research

Research internships

Giza, Egypt

Collected and analyzed EEG and facial-expression data for the Lumiere concentration-detection project, then interpreted variants and ran enrichment analysis (g:Profiler, KEGG) for an Alzheimer’s GWAS study.

Research

Undergraduate Thesis — AML drug sensitivity

Giza, Egypt

Trained Random Forest models to predict drug sensitivity from AML transcriptomic profiles, identifying markers linked to differential drug response. Advised by Dr. Eman Badr; graduated Cum Laude.

Transition

Moved to the U.S. to pursue drug discovery

Pittsburgh, PA

My thesis clarified the gap between finding genomic markers and knowing how a patient actually responds to a drug. To work on that gap, I moved to Pittsburgh for a PhD in Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology, focused on computational structural biology and drug design.

Research

First-year rotations

Pittsburgh, PA

Completed three ten-week rotations spanning the structural-biology spectrum: the VanDemark Lab (wet-lab structural biology — testing small-molecule inhibitors of the profilin–actin interaction by fluorescence anisotropy), the Durrant Lab (computational structural biology and drug design), and the Levin Lab (comparative genomics).

Transition

Joined the Durrant Lab

Pittsburgh, PA

Chose the Durrant Lab for my dissertation, focusing on structure-based drug design and open-source scientific software. Began developing LIGNOVA, an automated pipeline that docks bioactive PubChem compounds against experimental protein structures to build large-scale receptor-bound datasets for machine-learning — now over 232 million docked poses across 240,124 ligands and 10,851 structures, backed by a competitive NSF ACCESS allocation.

Research

Passed the comprehensive examination

Pittsburgh, PA

Defended an independent research proposal in an NIH F31 format to my committee, clearing the PhD comprehensive exam.

Research

Genomics collaboration — PNAS 2025

Pittsburgh, PA

Extended my Levin Lab rotation into a co-first-author study of how a hypermutable hotspot drives rapid recognition-gene evolution in Dictyostelium. Led the computational genomics, genome assembly, QC, and targeted annotation across ten chromosome-length genomes. Published in PNAS (2025).

Teaching

Undergraduate Research Mentor — TECBio REU

Pittsburgh, PA

Co-mentored an undergraduate on a ten-week project applying AlphaFold2 to explore HIV protease conformations for drug design, culminating in a research poster.

Present

Advanced to PhD Candidacy

Pittsburgh, PA

Proposed my dissertation work to my committee and was admitted to candidacy. Now wrapping up my PhD (expected April 2027) and seeking industry roles in computational drug discovery, ML for chemistry, and cheminformatics.

For the full record, see my CV and publications.