Amir Ata Ghaffarian

I am a Computer Science graduate and Research Intern in the Genomics & Regulatory Systems Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), working under Prof. Nicholas Luscombe and Dr. Charles Plessy. My work sits at the intersection of deep learning and biology, where I build self-supervised models to uncover structural patterns in genomic data.

I hold a B.Sc. in Computer Science from Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic), where I graduated top of my cohort. My research interests span deep learning, world models and reinforcement learning, robotics, embodied AI, and computational biology — I am especially drawn to problems where learning good representations of structured, high-dimensional data is the key bottleneck.

Before moving into research, I worked as a software and SRE/DevOps engineer, which shapes how I approach research today: I care as much about building robust, scalable pipelines as I do about the underlying models. I currently manage an end-to-end deep learning pipeline on an HPC cluster (SLURM, Singularity, PyTorch DDP) as part of my work at OIST.

I am currently applying for Ph.D. positions starting in 2027. Feel free to reach out if my research interests overlap with yours.