Dr. Siba Shanak is an associate professor at the Arab American University/Palestine (AAUP), since 2023. She is additionally the dean of Sciences at the University of AAUP, starting from 2019 until present. She has finished her PhD at Saarland University/Germany in the field of Bioinformatics, in 2015. For the past few years, she’s been working on biomolecular interactions and in data analysis in Next Generation Sequencing (NGS).
One of the research interests she focused on is the mechanistic insights of epigenetic modifications via modeling Protein:DNA interactions. In the field of NGS data analysis, Dr. Siba Shanak is currently analyzing the correlation of expression and epigenetic modifications at the exon level. She also explores the field of combinatorial histone allocation at the exon level. She conducts the analysis in adult, fetal, and cultured embryonic cells of human. To this aim, she investigates bed files for RNA-Seq, Methyl-Seq and Chip-Seq data. She undertakes the statistical analysis using Linux scripting tools and R statistical language. In essence, she is working on several packages provided via Bioconductor, which is based primarily on R platform. Additionally, she has explored gene mapping and differential gene and transcript expression analysis using tools such as Bowtie, Tophat and Cufflinks.
Education and Credentials:
• PhD in Bioinformatics (magna cum laude) at the Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany, January, 2015.
• M.Sc. in Computational Molecular Biology/ Bioinformatics (Honor’s degree), Saarland University, Saarbruecken, Germany, 2009.
• B.Sc. in Biology and Biotechnology (Honor’s degree), Arab American University, Jenin, Palestine, 2006. GPA: 3.99, with an ‘excellent’ standing.
• Secondary School Leaving Certificate (Tawjihi) – Average: 97.1%