Najib El-Sayed
Professor, Department of Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics
University of Maryland
Tuesday, September 30, 2025
Doors open at 6 p.m.
Lecture begins at 6:30 p.m.
ABOUT THE TALK
Tropical diseases continue to exact a devastating toll, despite decades of research and public health efforts. With the warming climate, transmission of these arthropod-borne infections is now taking place in the United States. However, the rise of genomic tools and the growing intersection between scientific discovery and advanced computational technologies have intensified the search for innovative solutions to combat these diseases.
In this seminar, Dr. El-Sayed will discuss his group’s research on host-pathogen interactions. He will explain how his laboratory at the University of Maryland is leveraging RNA technologies and machine learning, alongside human expertise, to gain a deeper understanding of infections, unlock insights from vast biomedical datasets, improve diagnostics, personalize treatments, optimize patient outcomes, and drive new models of international collaboration.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Dr. Najib El-Sayed is a professor of cell biology and molecular genetics at the University of Maryland, with a joint appointment in the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Maryland Institute of Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in molecular parasitology and then trained as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute postdoctoral fellow. In 1998, he joined The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Rockville, Maryland, where he led the sequencing, annotation, and comparative and functional genomic analyses of several human pathogens. He has been at the University of Maryland since 2006, where in addition to maintaining an active research program, he currently directs the Center for Bioinformatics at the University of Maryland Institute for Health Computing, the Brain & Behavior Institute’s Advanced Genomic Technologies Core (BBI-AGTC), and the Integrated Life Sciences program within the Honors College. He also serves on multiple NIH study sections as well as on the Scientific Advisory Board for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ Genomic Centers for Infectious Diseases (GCID).
El-Sayed’s NIH-funded research program applies genomic and computational approaches to the study of host-pathogen interactions with the goal of better understanding infection and survival mechanisms. From in vitro experiments interrogating pathogens and host cells during the course of an infection to studying the human innate immune system’s interaction with drug therapy in patients using multi-omic and bioinformatic tools, his group’s work is guiding and optimizing treatment approaches for parasitic infections. He has published over 100 research papers.
The El-Sayed group is also engaged in multiple collaborative efforts. In a recently initiated study, his team will apply single-cell RNA-seq and ATAC-seq to uncover transcriptomic and epigenetic changes underlying relapse behavior involving Oxycod*ne abuse. Using advanced computational methods (DNA foundation models), they will integrate genetic and epigenetic data to better understand how addiction-related behaviors are encoded in the human brain. In another collaborative study with investigators at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, El-Sayed will employ -omics and bioinformatics tools to characterize the immunologic and transcriptomic host responses underlying macrophage differentiation in colitis repair mechanisms.
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