Dr. Rehman Qureshi joins the Brain Tumor Institute Bioinformatics Core as Assistant Director!
We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Rehman Qureshi as Assistant Director of the Brain Tumor Institute Bioinformatics Core at Children’s National Hospital (CNH) 🎉.
Rehman brings over a decade of experience in translational bioinformatics, cloud computing, and multi-omic data science across academic, clinical, and industry settings — and we couldn’t be more excited to have him leading the scientific and computational strategy of the Core. Most recently, Rehman served as Principal Bioinformatics Scientist at Carisma Therapeutics, where he led translational bioinformatics for the first-in-human CAR-macrophage cell therapy clinical trial. There, he designed and deployed a scalable cloud-based HPC platform on AWS — scaling to 512 compute nodes and achieving a 6x speedup in NGS data processing — and built reproducible pipelines managing over 30 TB of sequencing data across 180 clinical trial samples. His integrative multi-omic analyses, spanning single-cell RNA-seq, WES, TCR/BCR-seq, and spatial transcriptomics, contributed directly to a publication in Nature Medicine and supported IND submissions and regulatory strategy.
Before his time in industry, Rehman was a Bioinformatics Scientist at the Wistar Institute, where he collaborated with interdisciplinary teams on complex genomic and transcriptomic datasets in oncology and immunology. He developed machine learning models for diagnosis and prognosis of lung cancer, glioblastoma, and breast cancer, and engineered a liquid biopsy biomarker test for lung cancer that was subsequently licensed to iMDx (Oncocyte) for clinical evaluation and commercialization — a remarkable translational achievement. Rehman has also demonstrated a deep commitment to education. He served as Adjunct Professor at Drexel University, where he designed and delivered a full bioinformatics coding bootcamp covering Python, numerical methods, and data visualization, mentoring students in both practical programming and scientific problem-solving. His toolkit spans RNA-seq, single-cell genomics, spatial transcriptomics, machine learning, and large-scale data engineering, with deep fluency in Python, R, AWS, Nextflow, and HPC environments. He is equally at home building infrastructure and extracting biological insight from complex datasets.
Rehman is passionate about using bioinformatics to understand cancer biology and improve outcomes for cancer patients.
Dr. Qureshi earned his Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from Drexel University, where his research focused on microRNA biology and the computational analysis of gene expression data in chronic pain models. He also holds M.S. and B.S. degrees in Biomedical Engineering from Drexel, where he received a merit-based full tuition scholarship and the Calhoun Fellowship in recognition of outstanding graduate research potential. Outside of work, he enjoys working out, riding his bike, and exploring new places.
We are so excited to have Rehman on board as we continue growing the Brain Tumor Institute Bioinformatics Core into a world-class hub for computational discovery and precision medicine in pediatric brain tumor research. Welcome, Rehman! 👏