Dr Jamie J. Alnasir M.Pharm (Hons), Ph.D.
Scientific Computing & Research Technology Leader
Research Computing | Scientific Platforms | HPC & Cloud | Research Infrastructure
Genomics & Bioinformatics
Dr Jamie Alnasir works across scientific computing, research technology,
high-performance computing, research infrastructure and data-intensive
scientific platforms. His experience spans institutional research-computing
strategy, production bioinformatics, population-scale genomics and reproducible
computational workflows across UCL, Imperial College London, the Institute of
Cancer Research, NatureMetrics and Royal Holloway, University of London.
His work focuses on translating complex scientific and institutional
requirements into sustainable computational capability, research platforms and
service roadmaps, working across researchers, engineers, institutional IT,
governance functions and external partners.
Dr Alnasir has an extensive publication record spanning computer science and
computational biology, with 10 peer-reviewed journal articles — nine as
first author and three as sole author — published or accepted in major
international venues including PLOS Computational Biology,
ACM Computing Surveys, Briefings in Bioinformatics,
GigaScience and the Journal of Computational Biology.
His broader research output encompasses HPC and distributed computing,
genomics and bioinformatics, DNA data storage, reproducible scientific
workflows and scientific software, together with invited and international
conference presentations and computational platforms used in research and
real-world settings. His work combines scholarly research with the translation
of computational methods into operational software used by tens of thousands
of users.
Alongside his institutional and research work, Dr Alnasir is the founder and
developer of
E6BJA,
a multi-platform electronic flight computer used by more than 20,000 active
users across pilot training, flight planning and general aviation. He is also
a UK CAA-licensed private pilot, bringing direct aviation experience to the
development and long-term operation of practical flight-computing software.
Academic and Professional Background
Dr Alnasir holds a Doctorate in Computer Science with Molecular Biology,
focused on distributed and high-performance computing applied to
data-intensive biological research, alongside a Master's degree in Pharmacy
and Chemistry. His doctoral research was conducted at the Centre for Systems
and Synthetic Biology (CSSB), Department of Computer Science at
Royal Holloway, University of London,
under the supervision of Prof. Hugh Shanahan.
His interdisciplinary background combines scientific computing, biomedical
research, commercial software development and experience of regulated clinical
and institutional environments. He has contributed to national-scale research
infrastructure and has delivered applied teaching and training in programming,
workflow systems and large-scale data platforms.
He retains a particular interest in postgraduate computing education and in
practically grounded teaching for data-intensive and computational disciplines.
Selected academic, institutional and commercial projects are presented in the
portfolio
section of this site.
Research Computing and Institutional Platforms
From 2023 to 2025, Dr Alnasir worked on cross-faculty research-computing
planning and service development at
University College London (UCL),
within the Information Services Division and in collaboration with
Advanced Research Computing (ARC).
He brought together requirements across multiple faculties, helped define
interim service models for virtualised and HPC-backed research computing, and
worked across researchers, ARC and central IT on priorities, delivery
constraints, governance and ownership for future institutional provision.
His broader institutional experience includes technical stewardship of
business-critical platforms at Royal Holloway, supporting regulated academic
operations, nationally governed integrations and the continuity of core
institutional services.
Scientific Computing and Research Platforms
At
NatureMetrics,
Dr Alnasir contributed to the transition of experimental metabarcoding and
metagenomic workflows towards reproducible production platforms supporting
commercial biodiversity monitoring and large-scale eDNA analysis. His work
included cloud migration and improvements to engineering practices around
reproducibility, versioning, containerisation and release.
At
Imperial College London,
he worked across population-scale genomics, high-performance computing and
emerging DNA-based information storage. This included development of
computational workflows associated with the 100,000 Genomes Project and
leading the development of computational capability for DNA-storage research
within Imperial's SCALE Lab, spanning encoding, decoding and error-correction
approaches.
At the
Institute of Cancer Research,
Dr Alnasir built shared scientific-computing capability for cancer research,
improving the reproducibility, portability and adoption of computational
workflows across research groups. His work included standardised workflow
practices, reusable HPC-based approaches for genomics, and researcher training
that enabled wider independent adoption of these methods.
Earlier Technical and Biomedical Experience
Earlier in his career, Dr Alnasir worked in enterprise software development
and data platforms across commercial and regulated environments before
completing a Master's degree in Pharmacy through the joint programme delivered
by
St George's Hospital Medical School
and
Kingston University.
This interdisciplinary background provides experience across scientific
research, enterprise systems, biomedical science, regulated clinical
environments and production software, and continues to inform his approach to
scientific and research computing.
Research Software Engineering and Teaching
Dr Alnasir's research-software work has focused on reproducible and scalable
approaches to computational science, particularly in genomics, bioinformatics,
distributed computing and HPC.
He has also delivered undergraduate and postgraduate teaching across computer
science, programming, large-scale data systems, databases, robotics and
bioinformatics, together with specialist computational training for
researchers. Selected publications are available through the
publications
section.
Academic Service
Dr Alnasir contributes to the academic community through peer review and has
served as an invited reviewer for international journals including:
- ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
- PLOS Computational Biology
- PLOS ONE
- Briefings in Bioinformatics
- IT Professional (IEEE Computer Society)
Aviation Technology
During UK pilot training with the
Civil Aviation Authority (CAA),
Dr Alnasir developed the
E6BJA Flight Computer App,
a modern electronic implementation of the E6-B flight computer. E6BJA supports
core flight-planning, navigation and performance calculations and is used
across general aviation and flight training.
Photography
Outside his professional work, Dr Alnasir is an active photographer and holds
a Diploma in Photography from the
Institute of Photography.
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