Dr. Andreas Henschel
Dr. andreas henschel Associate Professor Electrical Engineering

Contact Information
andreas.henschel@ku.ac.ae +971 2 312 3465

Biography

Dr. Andreas Henschel earned his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Technical University of Dresden (Germany), in 2002 and 2008, respectively. He joined Masdar Institute as a Post-doctoral researcher in 2009. In 2011, he became Assistant Professor at Masdar Institute, UAE.  He spent one year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT), USA as a Visiting Scholar.

Dr. Henschel's published work has its main focus on the topics of Bioinformatics, Artificial Intelligence, and Data Science, which is also central to his teaching activities since 2012. In particular, he was a driving force to build the MSc program Computational Data Science. He is an accredited Amazon Webservice (AWS) Academy educator and helped to facilitate Khalifa University as an AWS Academy membership institute.

In his capacity as Bioinformatics theme leader of the Khalifa University Center for Biotechnology, he headed the computational efforts to perform the first Whole Genome Sequencing for humans in the  United Arab Emirates. 

Further, his work focuses on the development of Bioinformatics tools used for Microbiome and Genetic data. During the Covid-pandemic, his Genomic Epidemiology pipeline was used to detect the first variants of concerns in the UAE.

He is currently Principal Investigator  in a CIRA project to a leverage large-scale genomic data platform, handling many thousands of human genomes, in combination with Deep Neural Networks and Transfer Learning techniques for genotype-phenotype predictions.

 


Education
  • Ph.D., Computer Science, Technical University of Dresden (Germany), 2008
  • M.Sc., Computer Science, Technical University of Dresden (Germany), 2002

Teaching
  • Algorithms in Bioinformatics (COSC620)
  • Artificial Intelligence (COSC604)
  • Distributed Sys and Could Comp (ECCE664)
  • Foundations of Computer Science (CIVE470)
  • Introduction to Computing Using C++ (COSC340)
  • Natural Language Processing (COSC464)

Affiliated Research Institutes/Centers
  • Research and Data Intelligence Support Center

Research
Research Interests
  • Genome analysis for next-generation sequencing
  • Machine learning for big data genetics/genomics, genotype-phenotype prediction
  • Microbiome informatics
  • Deep learning particularly transfer learning for sequential data

Research Projects

CIRA-2019-076: A Genomic Data Science Framework for the 1000 genome Arab genome