Fahad Saeed
Professor and Graduate Program Director
fsaeed@fiu.edu
(305) 348-3131
https://pcdslab.github.io
INV1 205
By appointment
ORCID: 0000-0002-3410-9552
Biography
Dr. Fahad Saeed is a Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences at Florida International University (FIU), Miami, FL. He received his PhD in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in 2010. He was trained as a Post-Doctoral Fellow and Research Fellow in the Systems Biology Center at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda MD from Aug 2010 to January 2014 respectively, under the supervision of Mark Knepper. Prior to joining FIU, Prof. Saeed was a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Department of Computer Science at Western Michigan University (WMU), Kalamazoo, Michigan since Jan 2014. He was tenured and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor at WMU in August 2018. He has served as a visiting scientist in institutions such as the Department of Bio-Systems Science and Engineering (D-BSSE), ETH Zurich, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), and the Epithelial Systems Biology Laboratory (ESBL) at the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland. Dr. Saeed's research interests are at the intersection of machine learning, high-performance computing, and real-world applications, especially in computational biology. He is the director of the Precision Computational Health and Biomedical Data Science Lab (Saeed Lab) at FIU. His lab develops machine-learning models, combined with high-performance computing and data science approaches, to study functional genomics (proteomics) and the organization of the human brain in the context of prediction, diagnosis, and biomarkers for disorders such as epilepsy, ADHD, autism, and Alzheimer’s. His research has been funded by NVIDIA, Intel/Altera, Xilinx, the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), including the NSF CAREER and NIH R01 (and R35 MIRA) grants. More information can be found at https://pcdslab.github.io/.
Honors and Awards
- Excellence in Research and Creative Activities Award, Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Science (KFSCIS), FIU, Dec 2024
- Editor, PLOS Mental Health, Oct 2023
- FIU Top Scholar, Research and Creative Activities , Florida International University, Sept 2022 CEC News Page
- Associate Editor, Experimental Results, Cambridge University Press, April 2022 Editorial Board Page
- Keynote Speaker at the 14th International Conference on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BICOB). More info here: BiCOB-2022 KeyNote Certificate
- Excellence in Applied Research Award, School of Computing and Information Science (SCIS), Florida International University (FIU), Dec 2020
- Distinguished Research and Creative Scholarship Award, Office of Vice President of Research WMU, Feb 2018
- NSF CAREER Award, 2017-2022
- ACM Senior Member, May 2017
- Outstanding New Researcher Award, College of Engineering and Applied Science (CEAS), Western Michigan University, Jan 2016 (1 faculty member gets the award in a single year for the entire college consisting of 7 academic departments)
- IEEE Senior Member, March 2015
- NSF CISE Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) Award, Feb 2015 - Feb 2018
- Fellows Award for Research Excellence (FARE), National Institutes of Health (NIH), June 2012 (Official award ceremony and US\$1000 travel grant)
- Travel award from Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), Summers 2009.
- Recipient of Think Swiss Scholarship, by the Government of Switzerland for two years (2007 and 2008).
- Travel award from D-BSSE ETH Zurich, Summers 2008.
Research and Educational Interests
Machine-Learning for health and biomedical data, proteomics, neuroinformatics, computational systems biology, high-performance computing.
Background Education
- Research Fellowship, Computational Systems Biology, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda MD. (2011-2014)
- Postdoctoral Training, Computational Proteomics, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda MD. (2010-2011)
- PhD, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago IL USA. (2006-2010)
- BSc Engg, Electrical Engineering, University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore. (2002-2006)
Selected Publications
- P. Parani, U. Mohammad and F. Saeed, "Utilizing Pretrained Vision Transformers and Large Language Models for Epileptic Seizure Prediction," 2025 8th International Conference on Data Science and Machine Learning Applications (CDMA), 2025, IEEE Xplore
- Muhammad Haseeb, and Fahad Saeed*, “GPU-Acceleration of the Distributed-Memory Database Peptide Search of Mass Spectrometry Data” , Nature Scientific Reports, Vol 12, Article 18713, 2023 Nature
- Oswaldo Artiles, Zeina Al Masry, and Fahad Saeed*, “Confounding Effects on the Performance of Machine Learning Analysis of Static Functional Connectivity Computed from rs-fMRI Multi-site Data”, Springer Neuroinformatics, Vol. 21, pages 651-668, August 2023 Springer
- Usman Tariq, and Fahad Saeed* , “SpeCollate: Deep cross-modal similarity network for mass spectrometry data based peptide deductions”, PLoS ONE, Vol. 16, Issue 10, Oct 2021 PubMed | PLoS
- Muhammad Haseeb, and Fahad Saeed* , “High performance computing framework for tera-scale database search of mass spectrometry data“, Nature Computational Science, Vol. 1, 550–561, August 2021 Arxiv | PubMed | Technical Report | Nature
- Fahad Almuqhim, and Fahad Saeed*, "ASD-SAENet: Sparse Autoencoder for detecting Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) using fMRI data", Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, Vol. 15, p. 27, March 2021 Frontiers
- Taban Eslami, Vahid Mirjalili, Alvis Fong, Angela R. Laird, and Fahad Saeed*, “ASD-DiagNet: A Hybrid Learning Approach for Detection of Autism Spectrum Disorder Using fMRI Data”, Frontiers of Neuroinformatics, vol. 13, pages 70, Nov 2019 arXiv | Frontiers