Rate My Professor Fatemah Vafaee

Professor Fatemeh Vafaee is a Professor in the School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences (BABS), Faculty of Science, at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney. She earned her PhD in Computer Science with a specialization in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Illinois at Chicago between 2007 and 2011. Following her doctorate, she held postdoctoral positions as a Research Associate at the University of Toronto, University Health Network, and Ontario Cancer Institute from 2011 to 2013, and as a Research Fellow at the Charles Perkins Centre, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Sydney from 2013 to 2017. Her career at UNSW includes Senior Lecturer in BABS from 2017 to 2022, Associate Professor from 2023 to 2026, and Professor since 2026. She currently serves as Deputy Director (Science) of the UNSW AI Institute since 2024 and was previously Deputy Director of the UNSW Data Science Hub from 2022 to 2024.

Vafaee's research expertise lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and clinical translation, focusing on machine learning, multi-omics integration, deep learning, biomarker discovery, systems biology, transcriptomics, drug repositioning, and cellular networks for precision medicine. She has pioneered AI-enhanced blood-based cancer detection models, large-scale biomedical knowledge graphs, multi-modal drug discovery pipelines, and domain-robust deep learning frameworks. Notable publications include 'SAFAARI: Contrastive Adversarial Open-set Domain Adaptation for Single-cell Integration & Annotation' (Genomics Proteomics Bioinformatics, 2026), 'From nucleotides to numbers: a comprehensive review of RNA feature extraction methods for computational modelling' (Briefings in Bioinformatics, 2025), and 'GeneRAIN: multifaceted representation of genes via deep learning of gene expression networks' (Genome Biology, 2025). With over 80 peer-reviewed publications in top journals such as Nucleic Acids Research, Nature Communications, and Briefings in Bioinformatics, her work boasts an i10-index of 45 and has attracted more than $19 million in research funding across over 20 projects. Her accolades include the Women in AI Asia-Pacific Award in Health (2023), Mid-Career Research Excellence Award from the Australian Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Society (2023), and UNSW Vice-Chancellor’s Award (Highly Commended) for Excellence in Industry-Engaged HDR Supervision (2025). Vafaee holds editorial positions as Associate Editor of Artificial Intelligence Review since 2017 and on the boards of Journal of Cancers and Journal of Patterns, and has served on committees such as the National Computational Merit Allocation Committee (2019-2022).