Hamda joined the UCD Cancer Data Lab as a postdoctoral researcher to study synthetic lethality in cancer. She completed her bachelors degree in Computer Science from National University of Science and Technology (NUST), Pakistan and PhD from the University of Galway, Ireland. Her PhD had a focus on studying and applying machine learning methods to infer gene regulatory networks from gene expression data. Prior to joining UCD Cancer Data Lab, Hamda did postdoctoral research at Insight Centre of Data Analytics, University of Galway, where she worked with two different research groups in parallel, both focused on public health. She developed a model to study the infection dynamics of Mpox by simulating disease transmission and control strategies using an agent-based modelling approach. She also worked as a part of digital mental health research group, where she closely examined the ramifications of non-pharmaceutical interventions related to COVID-19 on the mental well-being of the Irish population.

Hamda’s current research at the UCD Cancer Data Lab is dedicated to benchmarking various genetic interaction scoring methods and predicting synthetic lethality. She also works as a part-time lecturer in the School of Computer Science at UCD.