ABOUT
About me
Dr. Rohani is a computational biologist working at the intersection of genomics, neuroscience, and machine learning — with a focus on understanding how the brain's regulatory DNA shapes its development, and where that process goes differently in neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disease.
Research identity
Dr. Rohani is a postdoctoral research associate in the Sanders and Rinaldi labs at the Institute of Developmental and Regenerative Medicine (IDRM), Department of Paediatrics, University of Oxford. This work looks at the genetic, functional genomics, and epigenetic foundations of neurodevelopmental disorders and psychiatric disease.
A wide range of biological data is analysed — bulk and single-cell RNA-seq, single-cell ATAC-seq for chromatin accessibility, and bulk DNA sequencing — from brain tissue across different stages of development, aiming to identify when and how these disorders emerge. The longer-term goal is to find specific enhancers, the regulatory DNA regions that switch genes on and off, that could serve as therapeutic targets.
Before genomics, research centred on machine learning for bioinformatics: neural-network and matrix-factorization models for drug–drug interaction prediction, and deep-clustering approaches to breast cancer molecular subtyping. In between, doctoral research turned the same computational lens on education itself, studying how students learn precision medicine and health data science.
Dr. Rohani is also an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA), reflecting an ongoing interest in how bioinformatics and health data science are taught.
Current position
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Institute of Developmental and Regenerative Medicine
Department of Paediatrics, University of Oxford
Sanders & Rinaldi Labs · Oxford, UK