Phelelani Mpangase is a Bioinformaticist at the Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience (SBIMB) and the Wits Biomedical Informatics & Translational Science (WitsBITS) at the University of the Witwatersrand. He obtained both his BSc (Biochemistry & Genetics) and BSc Honours (Biochemistry) degrees at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He then pursued his MSc degree in Bioinformatics at the University of Pretoria, under the supervision of Prof. Fourie Joubert, where his project was aimed at designing a web resource for integrating Plasmodium protein annotations for the identification of potential malaria drug targets. In 2013, Phelelani joined the SBIMB as a Bioinformaticist, and has since provided Bioinformatics support, not only to students, but to other researchers in the University community. Over the years, he has gained considerable expertise and experience in many different aspects of Bioinformatics through student supervision, teaching, various collaborations and assisting fellow researchers. Through his recent PhD work, under the supervision of Prof. Michèle Ramsay and Prof. Scott Hazelhurst, Phelelani gained significant experience in the development of robust, scalable, portable, and reproducible scientific workflows for data analysis using Nextflow. His main research interests lie primarily in the analysis and interpretation of multi-omics (genome, proteome, transcriptome, microbiome, and exome) data, drug target discovery, data mining/integration and workflow development. His passion lies in programming and designing resources that help biologists analyze their biological data.
