Reda Rawi | Head Structural Bioinformatics Core
Vaccine Research Center, NIAID, NIH

Dr. Reda Rawi is a Staff Scientist and Head of the Structural Bioinformatics Core at the NIH Vaccine Research Center (VRC). He holds a Diploma in Mathematics from the University of Applied Sciences Koblenz (2007), an MSc in Bioinformatics from Birkbeck, University of London (2008), and a PhD in Computational Biology from the University of Duisburg-Essen (2013), where he trained under Prof. Dr. Daniel Hoffmann. Following his PhD, Dr. Rawi joined the Qatar Computing Research Institute as a postdoctoral scientist, where he developed novel machine learning methods for structural biology applications. In 2016, he was awarded a prestigious NIH postdoctoral fellowship and joined the VRC. Within three years, he was promoted to Staff Scientist and later became Head of the Structural Bioinformatics Core. At the VRC, Dr. Rawi has led structure-based vaccine design and antibody optimization efforts targeting HIV-1, influenza, malaria, and other pathogens. He was instrumental in integrating modern machine learning approaches into structural biology pipelines at the VRC, accelerating therapeutic discovery. He has authored over 70 peer-reviewed publications and is frequently invited to speak at international conferences on computational immunology and vaccine design.