A postdoctoral Research Fellow at Queen's University Belfast has been named recipient of the Women in HPC NI-HPC Student Award, recognising her innovative use of high-performance computing to transform disease research.
Dr Zeinab Abdelrahman, from QUB’s Centre for Public Health, was recognised for her work which demonstrated how Northern Ireland's Kelvin-2 supercomputer enables breakthrough speed in analysing vast datasets required for precision medicine.
Zeinab’s research on multi-omics integration - combining genetic, protein, metabolite, and epigenetic data - reduces analysis time from 4 to 6 hours on standard computers to approximately three minutes on HPC infrastructure.
"Standard computers couldn't handle the scale," Dr Abdelrahman explained during her presentation to the recent NI-HPC User Conference. "A desktop would crash repeatedly trying to process these matrices. On HPC, we process 146 samples - roughly one terabyte of data - in under 24 hours, with complete stability."
The practical impact extends to whole genome sequencing, which involves reading an individual's complete DNA to identify genetic variants linked to disease. What would usually take days or months on conventional systems now completes overnight, enabling researchers to move from data generation to understanding biological insights much faster.
Dr Abdelrahman's approach uses a computational method called MOFA (Multi-Omics Factor Analysis) to uncover hidden patterns across different data types that remain invisible when each dataset is examined separately. In kidney disease and rare disease research, this integration helps show how changes in genes, proteins, and metabolism all work together as causal factors.
"I'm thrilled to receive this award,” she said. “It validates not just the technical work, but the broader mission - showing that HPC is accessible to researchers from diverse backgrounds. I came to this without formal computational training, yet Kelvin-2 has transformed what's possible in my research. If this recognition encourages more early-career scientists, especially women, to explore high-performance computing, that would mean everything to me."
The award, presented by Women in HPC - a global organisation advancing diversity in computational research - recognises both technical achievement and the broader accessibility Dr Abdelrahman brings to complex bioinformatics.
Zara Birch from WHPC, and engagement officer at NI-HPC said: "Zeinab has taken complex computational methods and made them work for real-world disease research, cutting analysis times from hours to minutes while making the whole process more stable and reproducible.
“What particularly impressed us was her commitment to removing barriers for the next generation of researchers. She's not just producing outstanding science, she's actively working to democratise the tools that enable it."
The recognition comes during a pivotal year for NI-HPC, which has expanded access to advanced computational resources across a range of disciplines. The £3.6 million EPSRC-funded facility operates as a UK Tier-2 national resource, jointly managed by Queen's University Belfast and Ulster University.
For more information about NI-HPC, log on to https://ni-hpc.ac.uk/
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