Mariam R. Rizkallah

Mariam R. Rizkallah was a member of the lab from 2011 until 2014. She graduated from the Faculty of Pharmacy, Cairo University, Egypt in 2010. Afterward, she was awarded a scholarship at the Information Technology Institute, Egypt to study Software Engineering with a focus on Open Source Technologies, where she designed and developed the PharmacoMicrobiomics Web Portal. In 2011, Mariam joined the American University in Cairo (AUC) as a teaching/research fellow to pursue her master’s degree in Biotechnology. Working on her master’s research at the lab, Mariam was awarded two Study Abroad grants to collaborate with scientists from Alfred Wegner Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany on two projects, one of which was concerning collection of metagenomic and metatranscriptomic samples of Arctic phytoplankton on board of the research vessel Polarstern. From 2014 until 2017, Mariam was awarded Al-Alfi Foundation Leaders Program Scholarship to continue her research on algal transcriptomics in collaboration with Alfred Wegener Institute. Between 2017 and 2021, Mariam worked as a research associate at the Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology – BIPS, Bremen, Germany for the project Pharmacovigilance-Monitor. In her doctoral project, Mariam investigated various data transformation and analytics techniques for biological research data including environmental transcriptomic data, high-dimensional health insurance data to predict the risk of adverse drug events in patients, and lipidomics data to identify factors contributing to childhood obesity. Mariam is interested in solving data-related problems: automation of data transformation, analytics scalability and performance optimization.