Professional Background
Dr. Hafsa Farooq is a researcher specializing in evolutionary algorithms, optimizations and bioinformatics. Her research career has focused on enhanced genetic algorithms with saltation, a biological mechanism. She also estimated enzyme expression and pathways activity levels for microbes and mice community.
She worked as a teaching fellow at the department of Computer Science, GSU and taught Programming Language Concepts (4330/6330) in Summer 2023.
She attended a machine learning summer school at Columbia University, New York in June 2026 and found her deep interest in mechanistic interpretability.
During her master’s research, Dr. Farooq developed an Urdu language automatic speech recognition system using deep learning. She also attended a spring school in computational linguistics and natural language processing at University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka in 2019. She worked as a visiting faculty in the department of Electronics (Physics) at Government College University, (GCU) Lahore.
During her bachelor’s degree at GCU Lahore, she was awarded with Global Undergraduate semester exchange program from the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs in Spring 2014.
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Peer Reviewed Journals
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2
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Peer Reviewed Conferences
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5
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Selected Publications
- Farooq, Hafsa, Daniel Novikov, Akshay Juyal, and Alexander Zelikovsky. “Genetic algorithm with evolutionary jumps.” In International Symposium on Bioinformatics Research and Applications, pp. 453-463. Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore, 2023.
- Alomair, Ryan, Hafsa Farooq, Daniel Novikov, Akshay Juyal, and Alexander Zelikovsky. “Applying Genetic Algorithm with Saltations to MAX-3SAT.” In International Conference on Computational Advances in Bio and Medical Sciences, pp. 249-263. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2025.
- Rondel, Filipp Martin, Hafsa Farooq, Roya Hosseini, Akshay Juyal, Sergey Knyazev, Serghei Mangul, Artem S. Rogovskyy, and Alexander Zelikovsky. “Estimating enzyme expression and metabolic pathway activity in Borreliella-infected and uninfected mice.” Journal of Computational Biology 32, no. 2 (2025): 188-197.
- Rondel, Filipp, Hafsa Farooq, Roya Hosseini, Mark Grinshpon, and Alex Zelikovsky. “EMPathways2: Estimation of Enzyme Expression and Metabolic Pathway Activity Using RNA-Seq Reads.” In Transcriptome Data Analysis, pp. 39-46. New York, NY: Springer US, 2024.
- Luo, Shiqing, Anh Nguyen, Hafsa Farooq, Kun Sun, and Zhisheng Yan. “Eavesdropping on Controller Acoustic Emanation for Keystroke Inference Attack in Virtual Reality.” In NDSS. 2024.
- Yu, Dottie, Ram Ayyala, Sarah Hany Sadek, Likhitha Chittampalli, Hafsa Farooq, Junghyun Jung, Abdullah Al Nahid et al. “A rigorous benchmarking of alignment-based HLA typing algorithms for RNA-seq data.” bioRxiv (2024): 2023-05. (Submitted to Nature Methods)
- Akhlaq, Maham, Hafsa Farooq, and Engr Zahoor Ahmad. “Performance analysis of X-band RADAR in the presence of electronic jammers.” In 2019 International Conference on Electrical, Communication, and Computer Engineering (ICECCE), pp. 1-4. IEEE, 2019.
