Team

Dennis Lal, PhD, Principle Investigator

Dennis is Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular Medicine in the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University (CCLCM) and Assistant Staff in the Genomic Medicine Institute with a secondary staff appointment in the Neurological Institute’s Epilepsy Center both Cleveland, US. In addition to his primary appointments in Cleveland, he is Visiting Scientist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T., Cambridge, US as well as Group Leader at the Cologne Center for Genomics, Cologne, Germany.

His full biosketch can be found here.

Juanjiangmeng (Juliana) Du is a postdoctoral researcher at Cologne Center for Genomics. She did her PhD in Genetics at Cologne Center for Genomics and CECAD – Cluster of Excellence for Aging Research. She is interested in studying the biology underlying voltage-gated sodium channel associated neurodevelopmental disorders. She has also developed web-applications for gene– and disease–specific variant prioritization. Currently she is actively developing and applying machine-learning skills to large-scale genomic data.

Eduardo Pérez Palma is a postdoctoral researcher at the Cologne Center for Genomics of the University of Cologne, Germany. Eduardo’s research aims to understand the underlying genetic basis of brain disorders. To this end, at the Lal Group, he works with multi-dimensional and large-scale data developing computational methods for the analysis and interpretation of genetic variation, from small and common single nucleotide variants to large and rare copy number events.

Sumaiya is a post-doctoral researcher at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and the Analytical and Translational Genetics Unit at MGH, Harvard Medical School. Her research works help bridge the genetics and therapeutics groups within the Stanley Center through integration of computational methods and development of novel techniques to map genetic variants from sequence to tertiary structure of disease associated genes. Her research is broadly focused on genome-wide interpretation of disease-associated variants on the 3D structure to annotate structural motifs and characterize evolutionary constraint 3D sites to guide therapeutics target identification. Sumaiya received her Ph.D. in Computer Science (2017) with specialization on Bioinformatics and Machine Learning. Her full profile is available here.

Lisa-Marie Niestroj is a PhD student in the Graduate School of Biological Science program at the Cologne Center for Genomics of the University of Cologne, Germany. The aim of Lisa-Marie’s project is to identify novel genetic variants that are causally related to epilepsy, from small single nucleotide variants to large copy number events. For this purpose, she works with large-scale data processed in the Google cloud Platform .

Alex Smith is an associate computational biologist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. He is interested in the application of numerical and statistical methods to investigate the underlying genetic and biological causes of psychological disorders and neurological disease.

Monica Sudarsanam is a research assistant at Cologne Center for Genomics. Monica is a master student of Life science informatics at Bonn-Achen International Center for Information Technology. She is working on a framework to improve functional prediction of the missense variants.