Full First Name(s)
Umar
Title (honorific)
Dr
Academic Qualifications
PhD (2020, Universiti Putra Malaysia); MSc (2015, Universiti Putra Malaysia); BSc (2010, Ahmadu Bello University)
Brief Biography (English)

Umar Ahmad is currently the Head, Department of Anatomy at Bauchi State University in Nigeria. He is also a founder and CEO of BioSeq, a bioinformatics company that translates omics data into informative knowledge by providing quality high-throughput sequencing (NGS) data analysis. His work in basic and translational research is focused on developing targeted therapy for human bladder cancer, colon and lung cancers with primary focus Thus, his research group works on identifying and elucidating the genetic components of regulatory and signalling pathways that drive cancer recurrence and progression with a primary focus on bladder cancer as a model. 

Umar has gained an extensive experience in handling large scale genomic data and as such, he primarily uses Unix/Linux and R/Bioconductor to analyse high-throughput sequence data and he is familiar with commonly used bioinformatics applications such as fastqc, MultiQC, readseq, samtools, sra-tools, seqkit, bwa, bwa-mem, bowtie2, FGSEA and DESeq2 Bioconductor packages. In addition to this, he is well familiar with renowned public databases such as ENCODE, TCGA, CCLE and many other bioinformatics databases for mining genomics and transcriptome datasets. Moreover, Umar published a number of peer-reviewed scientific articles in local and international reputable journals including Nature.  Umar is also a recipient of numerous awards that includes the most recent; ASAPbio Fellow and Global Variome Fellowship in 2021. Galaxy Community Fund Fellowship by Galaxy and RStudio Certified Tidyverse Instructor award by RStudio Education Partners in the year 2020. 

Additionally, he works in an international team of scholarly professionals at AfricArXiv - the pan-African Open Access portal – towards increased discoverability of African research output. His role involves facilitating manuscript submission moderation and quality assurance as well as representing AfricArXiv at international meetings, events and webinars. At the Science Communication Hub Nigeria, he supports a team that provides mentorship, implements training and community building for the next generation of Nigerian scientists.

Umar is passionate about genetics and genomics, bioinformatics, computational biology and data science. He is also a strong advocate for community building that supports the data-intensive biomedical research community and underrepresented groups in STEM fields. Umar is occasionally found on Twitter(@babasaraki1), sharing science and most of the time on Github (babasaraki), organising codes and repositories. Umar is working towards  developing a R/Bioconductor package that could be used to extract cancer RNA-Seq data from cancer publicly available repositories. 
 
Job Title
Scientist
Primary Organisation
Bauchi State University, Gadau
Website Address for Primary Organisation
African Country
Nigeria
African Region
West Africa
Non-African country/countries of residing and working (present & past)
Canada

Profile Photo