About Us
Workshop Organizer: Layla Oesper, Department of Computer Science, Carleton College
Contact Info: loesper@carleton.edu, http://www.cs.carleton.edu/faculty/loesper/
About: Dr. Oesper's research centers around designing algorithms for analysis of high-throughput DNA sequencing data. In particular, her work focuses around applications in cancer genomics. In recent years she has studied algorithmic approaches to inferring the evolutionary history of a tumor from noisy DNA sequencing data.
Module Leader: Rika Anderson, Department of Biology, Carleton College
Contact Info: randerson@carleton.edu, https://apps.carleton.edu/people/randerson/
About: Dr. Anderson is an environmental microbiologist interested in how microbes and their viruses evolve, adapt, and diversify over time. She is uses bioinformatics approaches to investigate how marine microorganisms evolve in modern-day deep-sea hydrothermal vents, and also investigates microbial evolution throughout Earth's history. She is particularly interested in understanding what this can teach us about the origin and early evolution of life on our planet.
Module Leader: Getirira Onsongo, Department of Computer Science, Macalester College
Contact Info: gonsongo@macalester.edu, https://www.macalester.edu/mscs/facultystaff/onsongo/
About: Dr. Onsongo's research interest is in bioinformatics with three areas of focus: proteomics, computational agriculture and clinical diagnostics. He collaborates with researchers at the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute and Center for Mass Spectrometry and Proteomics at the University of Minnesota to develop software for accurate protein quantification. In partnership with the International AgroInformatics Alliance at the College of Food Agriculture and Natural Resource Science, also at the University of Minnesota, he works to develop a system for predictive crop breeding to help prevent food shortages in Sub-Saharan African countries. Previously, he was an Informatics Analyst at the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute and worked with a team of geneticists and physicians to develop a clinical pipeline for copy number variation detection.
Module Leader: Anna Ritz, Department of Biology, Reed College
Contact Info: aritz@reed.dot.edu, https://www.reed.edu/biology/ritz/
About: Dr. Ritz studies signaling pathways -- the series of protein-protein interactions that occur within the cell in response to an external stimulus -- using molecular interaction networks. Signaling pathways have been largely characterized manually, and she develops computational methods to automatically reconstruct these pathways in healthy and disease contexts. Dr. Ritz has also established "signaling hypergraphs" as a more accurate representation of signaling compared to graphs, and works on hypergraph algorithms for pathway analysis.
Module Leader: Ameet Soni, Department of Computer Science, Swarthmore College
Contact Info: soni@cs.swarthmore.edu, https://www.cs.swarthmore.edu/~soni/
About: Dr. Soni's general research interests are in the areas of machine learning and computational biology and medicine. From the machine learning perspective, he is interested in a) probabilistic approaches for learning and inference in graphical models b) statistical relational learning and c) deep learning. Dr. Soni applies models that he develops for a variety of problems, including clinical diagnosis, protein-structure prediction, gene modeling, biomedical-image analysis, and information extraction from biomedical texts.
Module Leader: Anya Vostinar, Department of Computer Science, Grinnell College
Contact Info: Vostinar@grinnell.edu, https://www.grinnell.edu/users/vostinar
About: Dr. Vostinar uses artificial life to explore questions regarding the evolution of cooperation in biological systems. In particular, she is currently interested in the evolution of mutualism (cooperation between individuals of different species) and how to create a model of the human gut microbiome using artificial life tools.
Module Leader: Catie Welsh, Department of Computer Science, Rhodes College
Contact Info: welshc@rhodes.edu, https://www.rhodes.edu/bio/welshc
About: Dr. Welsh's research interests are in the area of bioinformatics, particularly analyzing large datasets of sequencing data. Recently, she's been collaborating with researchers at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, focusing on analyzing the functional impact of mitochondrial variants in pediatric cancer patients and pediatric cancer survivors.