Hernando Ombao is a professor in the Statistics Program and the principal investigator of the Biostatistics Group at KAUST. His research focuses on developing time series models and novel data science methods for analyzing high-dimensional complex biological processes. He leads a group of researchers specializing in spectral and time-series analysis, functional data analysis, state-space models, and signal processing for brain signals and images. His group collaborates closely with neuroscientists to model the associations between neurophysiology, cognition and animal behavior.

Before joining KAUST, Professor Ombao was a tenured faculty member at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, U.S., Brown University, U.S. and the University of California, Irvine, U.S. He earned a B.Sc. in Mathematics in 1989 from the University of the Philippines, an M.Sc. in Statistics in 1995 from the University of California, Irvine, and a Ph.D. in biostatistics in 1999 from the University of Michigan.

Ombao is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association. He has been awarded several grants as a principal investigator by the U.S. National Science Foundation. In 2017, he received the UC Irvine School of Information Sciences Mid-Career Award for Research. He has served as a panel member of the Biostatistics Study Section at the U.S. National Institutes of Health and as an associate editor of leading statistical journals. He is co-editor of the book Handbook of Statistical Methods for Neuroimaging (CRC Press, 2016) and co-editor of a special issue of the Journal of Time Series Analysis.

At KAUST, he holds secondary appointments in the Applied Mathematics and Computational Sciences (AMCS) and the Bioengineering Programs. He also serves as chair of the Institutional Biosafety and Bioethics Committee. Ombao actively collaborates with researchers across the campus and is a co-founder of the interdisciplinary KAUST Neuro-AI Laboratory (NAIL).