Zahra Zare Jousheghani

University of Maryland, College Park

Zahra Zare Jousheghani is a Ph.D. candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she works at the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology under the supervision of Dr. Rob Patro. Her research develops statistical and computational methods to improve transcript abundance estimation from bulk and single-cell long-read RNA-seq data. She is lead author of the Bioinformatics paper introducing Oarfish, an open-source tool that uses probabilistic modeling for that task. She also contributes to open science through open-source software, reproducible benchmarking workflows, and public datasets.

Conference

CSHL Biological Data Science 2026

Research Focus

• Transcript abundance estimation
• Long-read RNA-seq
• Single-cell RNA sequencing
• Probabilistic modeling
• Barcode and UMI processing
• Open-source scientific software
• Reproducible benchmarking