Mohammed El-Kebir has worked on various cancer research topics, including tumor phylogenetics in the context of intra-tumor heterogeneity. El-Kebir develops algorithms to study the progression of a tumor from its initial stage, where the healthy cell first mutates, to the final stages, where the tumor cells metastasize and invade and colonize distant organs and tissues. His lab develops algorithms to reconstruct patterns of spread in disease outbreaks. One algorithm, called MACHINA, tracks the spread of cancer cells. He has also worked on a project under Jian Peng to predict response to cancer immunotherapy using a subclone-integrated machine learning model of neoantigen processing, presentation, and recognition.
El-Kebir received his BS and MS in Computer Science and Engineering from the Eindhoven University of Technology in 2006 and 2009. He received his MS in Bioinformatics from VU University Amsterdam in 2010 and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from VU University Amsterdam and Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in 2015. He worked as a Post Doctoral Associate at Brown University in the Department of Computer Science from 2014-2016 and at Princeton University in the Department of Computer Science from 2016-2017. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is also an Affiliate of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology and a Center Affiliate of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.