Othman Houcemeddine

Houcemeddine Othman is a bioinformatician and data scientist at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa with more than 12 years of experience in the field. He is a key member of a research team at Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience studying the pharmacogenomic diversity in Sub-Saharan Africa and its implication on drug-response mechanisms. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2017 at Institut Pasteur of Tunis focusing on studying the mechanisms of actions of venom peptides and the drug-designing of new inhibitory and immunosuppressing peptidomimetics targeting cancer and auto-immune diseases. He is also the developer of new computational tools to help expand the implementation of pharmacogenomics and precision medicine in the research and clinical sectors. He is an avid supporter of reproducible research practices and data sharing in bioinformatics and genomics fields. Doctor Othman is the co-founder of "Helixa Scientific" a startup for providing bioinformatics and genomic services that aim to bridge the clinical sector and the scientific research field with the new era of precision medicine and data-intensive practices. He is a member of the A3Africa/GSK consortium, the Wits Health Consortium in South Africa, the Pharmacogenomics Research Network, the H3ABioNet network, and the International Society for Computational Biology. He is also one of the founders of the Tunisian Association for Computational Sciences (TaCoS) and the creator of the Bioinformatics On Dunes (BOND) web blog.