Introduction: Hesham H. Ali is a Professor of Computer Science and Lee and Wilma Seaman Distinguished Dean of the College of Information Science and Technology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO). He currently serves as the director of the UNO Bioinformatics Core Facility that supports a large number of biomedical research projects in Nebraska and surrounding region. He has published numerous articles in various IT areas including scheduling, distributed systems, data analytics, wireless networks, and Bioinformatics. He has also published two books in scheduling and graph algorithms, and several book chapters in Bioinformatics. He has been serving as the PI or Co-PI of several projects funded by NSF, NIH and Nebraska Research Initiative in the areas of data analytics, wireless networks and Bioinformatics. He has also been leading a Bioinformatics Research Group that focuses on developing innovative computational approaches to classify biological organisms and analyze big bioinformatics data. The research group is currently developing several next generation big data analytics tools for mining various types of large-scale biological and medical data. This includes the development of new graph theoretic models for assembling short reads obtained from high throughput instruments, as well as employing a novel correlation networks approach for analyzing large heterogeneous biological and health data associated with various biomedical research areas, particularly projects associated with aging and infectious diseases. He has also been leading a multi-disciplinary project for developing secure and energy-aware wireless infrastructure to address tracking and monitoring problems in medical environments, particularly to study mobility profiling of various groups and implement a population analysis approach for healthcare research.