Email ikassam@nus.edu.sg

Irfahan currently serves as Research Fellow at the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, National University of Singapore. His research focuses on the development and application of advanced statistical and quantitative genetics and genomics methods to understand complex trait and disease variation in humans.

• NUS Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health

• Statistical genetics
• Genetics of complex traits and diseases

• Doctor of Philosophy, Statistical Genetics. University of Queensland, Australia.
• Master of Science, Medical Statistics. University of Leicester, United Kingdom.
• Bachelor of Mathematics, Honours Applied Mathematics. University of Waterloo, Canada.

• 2022-2025: Staff Bioinformatics Scientist, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Illumina Inc., Singapore.
• 2021-2022: Research Fellow, Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
• 2019-2021: Research Fellow, Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, National University of Singapore, Singapore.

• Jaganathan K, Ersaro N, Novakovsky G, Wang Y, James T, Schwartzentruber J, Fiziev P, Kassam I, Cao F, Hawe J, Cavanagh H, Lim A, Png G, McRae J, Banerjee A, Kumar A, Ulirsch J, Zhang Y, Aguet F, Wainschtein P, Sundaram L, Salcedo A, Panagiotopoulou SK, Aghamirzaie D, Padhi E, Weng Z, Dong S, Smedley D, Caulfield M, O’Donnell-Luria A, Rehm HL, Sanders SJ, Kundaje A, Montgomery SB, Ross MT, Farh KKH. Predicting expression-altering promoter mutations with deep learning. Science. 2025;389(6760):eads7373. DOI: 10.1126/science.ads7373.
• Kassam I, Foo LL, Lanca C, Xu LQ, Hoang QV, Cheng CY, Hysi P, Saw SM. The potential of current polygenic risk scores to predict high myopia and myopic macular degeneration in multi-ethnic Singapore adults. Ophthalmology. 2022;129(8):890-902. DOI: 10.1016/j.ophtha.2022.03.022.
• Lanca C, Kassam I, Patasova K, Foo LL, Li J, Ang M, H QV, Teo YY, Hysi PG, Saw SS. New polygenic risk score to predict high myopia in Singapore Chinese children. Transl Vis Sci Technol. 2021;10(8):26. DOI:10.1167/tvst.10.8.2.
• Kassam I, Tan S, Gan FF, Saw WY, Tan LWL, Moong DKN, Soong R, Teo YY, Loh M. Genome-wide identification of cis DNA methylation quantitative trait loci in three Southeast Asian populations. Hum Mol Genet. 2021;30(7):603-618. DOI:10.1093/hmg/ddab038.
• Kassam I, Wu Y, Yang J, Visscher PM, McRae AF. Tissue-specific sexual dimorphism in human gene expression. Hum Mol Genet. 2019;28(17):2976–2986. DOI: 10.1093/hmg/ddz090.
• Sidorenko J, Kassam I, Kemper K, Zeng J, Lloyd-Jones LR, Montgomery GW, Gibson G, Metspalu A, Esko T, Yang J, McRae AF, Visscher PM. The effect of X-linked dosage compensation on complex trait variation. Nat Commun. 2019;10(1):3009. DOI:10.1038/s41467-019-10598-y.