Karan Uppal

Dr. Uppal received his BS in Biomedical Engineering from University of Iowa in 2007, MS in Bioinformatics from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2009, and Ph.D. in Bioinformatics with a minor in Predictive Analytics from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2015. He joined Emory University in 2009 and was elevated to Assistant Professor of Medicine in 2016. He was the Director of Computational Metabolomics and Integrative Omics in the Clinical Biomarkers Laboratory at Emory from 2016-2020 and is now in a data science leadership position at a pharmaceutical company.

His primary research focus is computational metabolomics, integrative omics, biomarker discovery, machine learning, text mining, and application development. He has developed a series of algorithms and R packages for metabolomics data processing, annotation, biomarker discovery and data mining, and integrative network analysis. He has also developed feature selection techniques to identify robust biomarkers and natural language processing tools for automated summarization and knowledge discovery from clinical and biomedical text.

He has served as a PI/Co-I on multiple NIH funded projects focused on identification of biomarkers of environmental exposures and diseases (Alzheimer’s disease, age-related macular degeneration, ARDS, diabetic retinopathy, cardiovascular disease, malaria, and others), developing computational methods for integrating multi-scale data (clinical, omics, imaging, experimental, and laboratory) for precision medicine, and using data mining and natural language processing techniques for extracting and summarizing information from clinical and biomedical text.