UAB: Comprehensive Cancer Center

February 16, 2011

Jonas S. Almeida, Ph.D., has joined the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center as a senior scientist and professor of pathology. He is the inaugural director of the Department of Pathology’s new Division of Informatics, which began in January 2011 with his arrival.

Prior to coming to UAB, Dr. Almeida was a professor of bioinformatics at the University of Texas-M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and an adjunct professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston from 2006-2010. He was previously an associate professor of bioinformatics at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston.

Dr. Almeida was born in Portugal, raised in Angola and eventually returned to Lisbon, receiving his undergraduate degree at the University of Lisbon.  After obtaining his Ph.D. in Biological Engineering in Lisbon at the University Nova in 1995, he came to the United States as a post-doctoral fellow in Microbial Ecology at the University of Tennessee, Oak Ridge National Lab.

Dr. Almeida has 120 peer-reviewed publications and is an internationally recognized authority in the field of bioinformatics. His main areas of interest include bioinformatics, computational statistics and computational infrastructure for integration of data acquisition and analysis. Dr. Almeida is involved in a number of collaborative research initiatives such as the Center for Translational Science Awards (CTSA) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA).

 
The Division of Informatics pursues computational research and tool development to integrate biomolecular and clinical data and advance personalized medicine. Accordingly, collaborative research is configured to involve computational statisticians and clinical researchers. The resources developed and maintained at the division to support this research range from novel integrative algorithms and the corresponding software libraries to novel integrative computational infrastructure.