Dr Vafaee is the Deputy Director of the UNSW Data Science Hub and an Associate Professor at the School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences. She has established the Biomedical AI Laboratory at the UNSW Faculty of Science and leads a multi-institute, industry-aligned next-generation graduate program, Med-Tech.AI on AI-enabled medical technologies, from diagnostics to therapeutics. Dr Vafaee is also the Founding Director of OmniOmics.AI Pty Ltd developing innovative AI solutions to accelerate personalised medicine and precision therapy. Her contributions to the field have been recognised internationally, as the Winner of the prestigious Women in AI Asia-Pacific (WAI-APAC) Award in Health (2023) and Runner-Up of WAI-APAC Innovator of the Year, and nationally, with the Mid-career Research Excellence Award from the Australian Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Society (2023), among others.

Dr Vafaee received her PhD in Artificial Intelligence (2011) from the School of Computer Science at the University of Illinois in Chicago, USA, followed by 2 multidisciplinary fellowships on computational biomedicine (2012 – 2017) at the University of Toronto, Canada, and the University of Sydney, Australia. She is a renowned scientist in computational biomedicine with over a decade of experience in AI-integrated translational medicine and drug discovery through close partnerships with industry and governmental stakeholders. Over the past five years, her R&D activities have secured over $13M (unapportioned) as Lead CI or co-CI with major leadership roles. Her work has led to 60+ publications in high-impact journals (averaging an impact factor of 10), the development of 20+ software tools, patents, and medical products currently on the path to commercialisation, as well as receiving widespread media coverage.