Syed Muhammad Umer Abdullah is a PhD student in the Department of Electrical Engineering at City University of Hong Kong. He holds an MPhil (2021) in Electronic and Computer Engineering from the The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, and a B.E (2012) in Electrical Engineering from the National University of Sciences & Technology, Pakistan. Before his current appointment, he has served as a Teaching Assistant at the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong (2016-2017). He has had Research appointments at the Department of Microbiology, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong (2021-2022), Barton Lab, The University of California-Riverside, CA, USA (2019), and the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, COMSATS University, Islamabad, Pakistan (2013). He has served as an Associate Technical Professional in Halliburton Completion Tools at Halliburton Worldwide Limited, Pakistan (2013-2015), where he performed over 50 well completions, well services, and well surveys. He has also served as a Safety and Security Engineer at Huaneng Shandong Ruyi Energy Private Limited, Pakistan (2015-2016), where he worked on ensuring compliance with company regulations during the construction of the 1320MW Sahiwal Coal-fired Power Plant.
His primary research interests include Bioinformatics, Pandemic response, Deep learning, & Computational immunology, particularly Computation of evolutionary parameters of evolving viral populations; Predicting functionally important mutations; Data-driven epidemic mitigation strategies; Analysis of infection outbreaks.
