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 and Causality in Microbiomes.

Recent Exciting Research from this group includes:

  • Combining metagenome, metaresistome, metareplicome, and causal inference (Microb Genom, 2022)
  • Lower respiratory tract microbiome in smokers (Campos et al., Access Microb, 2022)
  • 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)

Distinguished University Professor 2024


Prof. Giri Narasimhan

Fellow of the ASM, 2020


Prof. Kalai Mathee

FIU Top Scholar 2021 & 2023


Prof. Giri Narasimhan


KFSCIS Ryder Endowed Professor, 2023-26


Prof. Giri Narasimhan

FIU Faculty Senate Award 2022

Mentoring and Advising


Prof. Giri Narasimhan

Five BioRG PhDs since 2020


Camilo Valdes, Musfiqur Sazal,

Daniel Ruiz-Perez, Farzana Yusuf

and Vitalii Stebliankin


Recent Publications

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Latest software

Check out: MeRRCI, PALM, Jasper, and PluMA.
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Recorded Talks