priority research area: HealthTech
Scientific achievements
Szymon Grabowski is a professor at the Institute of Applied Computer Science, Faculty of Electrical, Electronic, Computer and Control Engineering, Lodz University of Technology. He received the title of professor of engineering and technical sciences, in the discipline of technical computer science and telecommunications, in 2023. His research interests span text algorithms, bioinformatics, and data compression and coding — fields that naturally converge in the processing of genome sequencing data. He earned his Ph.D. (2003) in image recognition (minimum-distance classifiers) and his habilitation (2011) in text algorithms, including bit-parallel methods for exact and approximate string matching and variants of the compressed FM-index. Since then, his research has increasingly focused on bioinformatics.
Research profile and research directions
His key achievements include PgRC and PgRC2, lossless tools for FASTQ sequencing-data compression offering a high compression ratio and fast decompression, requiring no reference genome; copMEM2, a scalable tool for finding maximal exact matches; MBGC, a bacterial genome collection compressor with over 12k downloads; KMC/KMC2 for fast k-mer counting; and FFC, a fast FASTA compressor. PgRC’s key idea is the pseudogenome — an approximation of the shortest common superstring onto which sequencing reads are mapped. Prof. Grabowski is currently working on indexing collections of bacterial genomes, on sequencing data formats combining compact representation with fast access to selected statistics, and on plagiarism detection in students’ source code.
Honours and recognition from the scientific community
His international collaborations include consulting on a Croatian Science Foundation project at the Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb (2019–2022), including an invited lecture. He received the Best Paper Award at SPIRE (Glasgow, 2006), has written over 100 reviews for international journals and conferences, and has long served as a reviewer for NCN (Polish National Science Centre) grant applications.