Faculty and Staff

Bishnu Sarker joined Meharry Medical College as an assistant professor of computer science and data science in the School of Applied Computational Sciences in November, 2021. He has hands-on research experience of designing and applying complex artificial intelligence (AI) and data science techniques for solving problems in the field of health care, biology and drug discovery.

Dr. Sarker worked as a Ph.D. researcher in the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (INRIA), one of the top research institutes in France and across the globe. His research was primarily to understand the functional characteristics of proteins using graph-based approaches exploring structural and sequence information of proteins. Designing an efficient automatic protein function annotation pipeline is crucial for understanding disease and discovering new drugs and therapies.

In general, Dr. Sarker is applying AI, deep learning, natural language processing (NLP), and graph-based reasoning approaches to effectively describe the proteins numerically, and to infer the functional characteristics of proteins from complex, heterogeneous, and interconnected biomedical data. He proposed GrAPFI and Prot-A-GAN for automatic protein function annotation.

He was a visiting researcher at University of Montreal and Mila in Quebec, Canada.  In an interdisciplinary project during his master’s degree at Sorbonne University, he applied data science approaches to understand the mutational landscapes in BCR-IG (B-Cell Receptor Immunoglobulin) sequences of various types of cancers. He also developed a visualization tool to help hematologists design personalized therapy for lymphocytic leukemia patients.

His research outcomes are regularly published in important venues and top journals like ICML CompBio, BMC Bioinformatics, Springer Nature and Blood Advances, by the American Society of Hematologists.

Dr. Sarker has received numerous awards and scholarships for his academic excellency that includes Undergraduate President Gold Medal, Erasmus Mundus Master’s Scholarship, Inria Cordi-S PhD Scholarship, University of Lorraine DrEAM Mobility Grant, and various travel grants to present his works.

Research Interests

• Machine Learning
• Graph Representation Learning
• Knowledge Graph and Link Prediction
• Natural Language Processing
• Network Biology and Drug Discovery
• Bioinformatics

Research Lab

Drug Discovery Lab