Pawel Labaj, PhD

Professor Łabaj's research interests cover the methodological advances in data science and their application to topical biomedical challenges, with a focus on advancing transcriptomics and metagenomics in the pursuit of precision medicine. He graduated in 2006 from Silesian University of Technology with a major in Computer Science in Medicine, for his work on Fetal Heart Rate (FHR) assessment using neural networks (in collaboration with the Institute of Medical Equipment and Technology - ITAM, Zabrze). He then moved to Kreil's Lab (BOKU University) in Vienna, where he obtained a Ph.D. in Bioinformatics in 2012 for his work on measurement and data analysis in the presence of noise and complex backgrounds.

During his postdoc at the same lab, he joined the US FDA SEQC Consortium, where he played a leading role in benchmarking large-scale gene expression profiling technologies, including RNA-Seq. This allowed him to apply and obtain a prestigious personal research grant (APART) from the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 2014. In 2017 he became the Head of Bioinformatics at the Małopolska Centre of Biotechnology (MCB) at Jagiellonian University. In 2018, he obtained Venia Docendi (habilitation) in Bioinformatics in Austria and later the same year in Biomedical Engineering and Biocybernetics in Poland. In 2019, he became the Scientific Secretary of MCB, and in December 2023, he became the Deputy Director of MCB. Since April 2024 he is a Jagiellonian University Professor. He is a member of the MetaSUB Consortium Board of Directors and a co-founder of the MetaSUB Europe Society. He also serves as the Treasurer of the Polish Bioinformatics Society. He is a recipient of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Excellence in Reproducible Sciences Award (2018) and the City of Krakow Prize in Science for his contributions to the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic (2021). He is an author of over 70 peer-reviewed scientific publications which were cited almost 4000 times (H-index: 26, i-index 36).