KC Lab Team

Dukka KC, Ph.D.

Principal Investigator

Dukka KC is the Associate Dean for Research, College of Computing; Professor, Computer Science; and Associate Director of the Institute of Computing and Cybersystems (ICC) at Michigan Technological University. Born and raised in the beautiful Himalyan Country Nepal, he went to Japan for his undergraduate studies. He received his B.E. in Computer Science in 2001 from the College of Engineering at Kyoto University. He then received his M.Inf. and Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from Kyoto University in 2003 and 2006 respectively working under Dr. Tatsuya Akutsu. Before he finished his Ph.D., he also worked as a visiting graduate student in the lab of Dr. Sandor Vajda at Boston University. After finishing his Ph.D, he did his first postdoctoral fellowship at Georgia Institute of Technology working under Dr. Jeffrey Skolnick. After that, he was a postdoctoral fellow at UNC-charlotte in the Department of Bioinformatics and Genomics working under Dr. Dennis Livesay. Subsequently, he also did another fellowship as a Cancer Research Training Award Fellow at National Cancer Institute at National Institutes of Heatlh (NIH) under Dr. Byungook Lee. Subsequently, he also worked as a Bioinformatics Scientist at Center for Information Technology at NIH for Dr. Peter Munson. He then joined North Carolina A&T State University and was an Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Computational Science and Engineering at North Carolina A&T State University (NCA&T) before he moved to Wichita State University in 2019. From 2019 to 2021, he was Director of Data Analytics and Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Wichita State University.Besides his interest in the development of various computational approaches to various problems in bioinformatics but not limited to elucidation of protein sequence, structure, function and evolution relationship, analysis of Next-gen sequencing data. He is also actively involved in various initatives in improving computing infrastructure. He also serves on the editorial board of BMC Bioinformatics and Frontiers in Bioinformatics Journal. In addition, he is also co-chair of Function COSI @ ISMB. ...read more

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Hamid Ismail, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Researcher

Hamid D. Ismail received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in computational science from NC A&T State University, USA, and DVM and B.Sc. from the University of Khartoum. He earned several professional certifications including SAS Certified Base Programmer, SAS Certified Advanced Programmer, SAS Certified Clinical Trials Programmer, and SQL Expert Programmer. He is a bioinformatician, biologist, data scientist, statistician, and machine learning specialist. Hamid worked as a research associate at NC A&T State University and as a contractor in federal and clinical trial projects. He is currently working as a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Computer Science at Michigan Technological University and as Adjunct Professor at NC A&T State University. Hamid's research interests are focused on bioinformatics algorithms, application of machine learning in genomic data and post-translational protein modifications, and genomic data science including the development of bioinformatics tools. Hamid is also peer-reviewing for several renowned journals and science book publishers and an author of two textbooks.

Dr. Meenal Chaudhary, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Researcher

Meenal did her PhD in Computational Data Science and Engineering from North Carolina A&T State University. She is presently working as a postdoctoral researcher in KC Lab at Michigan Tech and Newman Lab at North Carolina A&T State University. Her research interests include Transfer learning, Protein Language models, Deep learning models.

Mohadeseh Soleimanpour-moghadam, Ph.D.

Visiting Professor

Mohadeseh Soleimanpour-moghadam was born in 1986, Iran. She received her B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman (SBUK), Kerman, Iran, in 2008, 2011 and 2016, respectively. Since then, she has been working with different academic and industrial positions in Iran. She is currently an Assistant Professor with the Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Bam, Bam, Iran. Mohadeseh is also peer-reviewing for several renowned journals and conferences. Her current research interests include machine learning, bioinformatics, soft computing, applied optimization and wireless communications.

Pawel Pratyush

PhD Student

Pawel Pratyush is a Ph.D. student at KC Lab at the College of Computing, Michigan Tech. Prior to joining KC Lab, he was an undergraduate student of Computer and Engineering (CSE) at National Institute of Technology (NIT), Bhopal, India. His undergraduate research projects/papers largely dealt with the application of machine learning and deep learning in robotics, spatiotemporal modeling, health informatics, and astrophysics. At KC lab, he is responsible for developing deep learning-powered computational tools for the prediction of Post-Translational Modification sites in protein sequences. He is also interested in tackling problems related to Bioinformatics using notions of multilabel learning, cross-talks, transfer learning, and positive unlabeled learning. During his spare time, he likes watching movies, going on hikes, listening to music, and discussing his favorite shows/movies.

Soufia Bahmani

PhD Student

Soufia Bahmani is a PhD student advised by Dr. KC at College of Computing, Michigan Tech. She received her Bachelors in Information Technology Engineering from Qazvin Azad University, Iran and subsequently completed her Masters from Amirkabir University, Iran in Information Technology Engineering. Before joining KC lab, she co-authored multiple papers in reputed journals in the field of image processing, machine learning and health informatics. She was also involved in software industry as a full stack developer over a span of 5 years. At KC lab, she is interested in developing handcrafted features independent deep learning models to solve important problems related to proteomics and genomics.

Suresh Pokharel

PhD Student

Suresh Pokharel is a Ph.D. student at the College of Computing at Michigan Technological University. He is working as a Graduate Research Assistant at Dr. Dukka KC's research lab (KC-Lab). He is broadly interested in computational biology, machine learning, deep learning methods, transfer learning, generative modeling, and computer vision. In his recent works, he is developing machine learning and deep learning based models to locate the various post-translational modification (PTM) in protein sequences. Suresh received a Bachelor of Computer Engineering degree in 2017 and an M.Sc. in Computer Systems and Knowledge Engineering degree in 2021 from Tribhuvan University, Nepal. ...read more

Ženia Sidorov

MS Student

Ženia (Evgenii) Sidorov Graduated with BS in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Northern Arctic Federal University (Russia), BA in Circumpolar Studies from Nord University (Norway) and completed one-year program in Molecular Biology from Jagiellonian University (Poland). Research interests include language models and their application to bioinformatics problems like posttranslational modification and cross-talk prediction.