Dr. Itika Arora is an Assistant Professor in the College of Medicine at Alfaisal University, Riyadh, and Track Director for the MS in Bioinformatics program. She is a computational biologist with nearly a decade of research experience across leading institutions in the United States.

Dr. Arora earned her PhD in Cancer Epigenetics from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2022, following an MS in Bioinformatics from Indiana University. Her postdoctoral training spanned UAB, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Miami, covering next-generation sequencing in lung injury, single-cell epigenomics in Alzheimer's disease, and metabolic disease models. She subsequently served as an Assistant Bioinformatics Scientist at Emory University in Atlanta, working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention through the Pathogen Genomics Center of Excellence on genomic epidemiology and pathogen surveillance.

Her research interests center on the epigenetic regulation of cancer, with a particular focus on integrative multi-omics in glioblastoma. She works to define epigenetic subtypes, including the glioma CpG island methylator phenotype, and to identify molecular drivers and prognostic biomarkers that connect DNA methylation signatures to tumor heterogeneity, patient survival, and treatment resistance. Her broader interests extend to precision medicine, biomarker discovery in metabolic and neurodegenerative disease, and host-pathogen genomics.

Her core strengths lie in multi-omics data integration and pipeline engineering. Dr. Arora works fluently across bulk RNA-seq, single-cell ATAC-seq, DNA methylation arrays and sequencing, metagenomics, proteomics, and metabolomics, applying differential expression, pathway and transcription factor enrichment, network biology, and survival modeling. She develops automated, reproducible workflows in R, Python, Perl, and MySQL using Nextflow, Snakemake, and Docker on high-performance and cloud platforms including AWS and GCP.