Summer Research 2019 – here we go!

Reed has finished for the year, but that doesn’t mean that students are done. Last week kicked off a slew of undergraduate researchers doing all kinds of research. In no particular order, here’s a taste of what people will be working on in the compbio lab. Stay tuned for occaisonal group updates.

Math-CS major Jiarong (Lee) Li ’21 and biology major Tunc Kose ’22 are going to develop algorithms to analyze a cell’s response to external signals (called signaling pathways). They will be working to extend ideas based on the original PathLinker paper and Ibrahim Youssef’s Localized-PathLinker paper.

Recent graduate Amy Rose Lazarte ’19 (alt. bio major with a CS emphasis) will continue to develop a resource and modeling framework for understanding the effect of thermal variation on freshwater phytoplankton. Co-advised by ecologist Sam Fey, she has developed a computational pipeline to analyze longitudinal lake temperature data using simulations of phytoplankton swimming strategies.

Biology major Tayla Isensee ’20 is working on identifying targets of retinoic acid signaling in zebrafish eye development. She has a hand in the wetlab work with developmental biologist Kara Cerveny, and she will be building a zebrafish protein-protein interaction network to find potential regulators to test. First, though, she’s going to hunt for retinoic acid response elements (RAREs) in the zebrafish genome to identify direct targets of retinoic acid.

Another recent graduate, neuroscience major Alex King ’19, will be wrapping up his thesis work to build a network that integrates gene, transcript, and protein relationships in order to identify dysregulated pathways in polygenic diseases based on genome-wide association study (GWAS) data.

Biology major Karl Young ’20 will be reading up on computational modeling in neuroscience, and figuring out the intersection of my world (algorithms for biological networks) and neurobiologist Erik Zornik’s world (neural circuits and how they affect behavior).

Last but not least, CS graduate Ananthan Nambiar ’19 will be getting his thesis ready to present as a poster at ISMB/ECCB in Basel later this summer. He modeled proteins as language with the help of his main advisor, natural language processing (NLP) expert Mark Hopkins in CS.