Dr. Fardina Alam is a Professional Track Faculty (UMD's equivalent of an Assistant / initial-rank Professor of Teaching)) at the Department of Computer Science (CS), University of Maryland (UMD). She obtained her Ph.D. in Computer Science from George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, and has since been actively involved in teaching and research. She has worked as a Graduate Research Assistant under the supervision of Professor Dr. Amarda Shehu at Computational Biology Lab, Mason on Deep Learning and Machine Learning techniques in the domain of Structural Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the Computational Biology Lab. Her works were funded by an NSF FET Grant #1900061. 

Dr. Alam is honored to have received the "Outstanding Dissertation Award 2023" from Mason, as well as the "Biomolecules Editor's Choice Article 2022" award. One of her papers was featured as the "Title Story" of the Journal Biomolecules in 2022, highlighting her contributions to the field.

Interests: 

• Structural Bioinformatics, Computational Biology - Protein Structure Representation Learning

• Generative AI

• Responsible AI and Data Ethics

• Data Science, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning