Biography
Hafsa Qureshi is a graduate from COMSATS University Islamabad with a BS in Bioinformatics, finishing first in her class. She is the first in her family to attend university.
Her research applies deep learning to biological problems. For her thesis she built an image-analysis pipeline that measures how heat stress affects wheat flowers. It cut manual annotation time by about 99% and identified a new indicator of heat-stress response. The work was done with researchers at COMSATS and the National Agricultural Research Centre, and it points toward protecting Pakistan’s food supply as temperatures rise. Her other projects include protein modelling and drug docking, comparative genomics of cereal crops, and a web-based protein structure predictor.
Outside the classroom, she led the marketing team of the Biome Student Society, wrote on AI for a technology blog, and volunteered with fundraising for cancer patients at Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital.
At Oxford, Hafsa aims to study at the intersection of genomic and statistical methods to drug discovery and precision medicine. She plans to complete a PhD, become an educator, and build a bioinformatics research group at home.