Bioinformatics

What can we learn from large, highly complex biological datasets? Researchers who use informatics, omics, and multidimensional analysis use mathematical, computational, and statistical tools to identify novel relationships between variables in these large datasets, revealing complex and often nuanced biological phenomena. 

Featured Research

EZbakR: tools to facilitate studies of gene expression dynamics and regulation

Isaac Vock ‘25

he/him

Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry (Simon Lab)

Left: Isaac Vock presenting a poster; Right: A graphical abstract of Vock's work

Spatial multi-omic analysis of human lymphoid tissues

Archie Enninful ‘26

he/him

Biomedical Engineering (Fan Lab)

Left: Archie in the lab; Right: Fluorescence image of cancer tissue Archie analyzes in his research

Faculty

  • Marcus Bosenberg

    Professor; Dermatology, Pathology, and Immunobiology
    • Bioinformatics
    • Biological Circuits
    • Systems Biology
    Research Interests: Melanoma biology; soft tissue tumors
  • Martina Dal Bello

    Assistant Professor; Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
    • Bioinformatics
    • Computational Biology
    • Systems Biology
    Research Interests: research in the Dal Bello lab focuses on how microbes respond to and modify their environment, and how these feedback processes shape species interactions, assembly processes, and the function of microbial communities.
  • Purushottam Dixit

    Assistant Professor; Biomedical Engineering
    • Bioinformatics
    • Biological Circuits
    • Computational Biology
    • +1 more
    Research Interests: Build machine learning methds that are rooted in statistical physics to analyze high quality high dimensional “omics” data from biological systems
  • Rong Fan

    Professor; Biomedical Engineering
    • Bioinformatics
    • Biological Circuits
    • Properties, Structure, Composition of Biological Systems
    • +1 more
    Research Interests: Combining single-cell analysis technology and systems biology to study cell-cell communication and cellular heterogeneity in human cancers and the immune system
  • Mark Gerstein

    Professor: Biomedical Informatics, Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry, Computer Science, and Statistics & Data Science
    • Bioinformatics
    • Computational Biology
    Research Interests: Bioinformatics; biological database design, genomics; human genome annotation; gene expression analysis; data mining; macromolecular structure and function
  • Scott Holley

    Professor; Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology
    • Bioinformatics
    • Biological Circuits
    • Computational Biology
    • +3 more
    Research Interests: The systems biology, biomechanics and molecular biophysics of early spinal column development
  • Farren Isaacs

    Professor; Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology
    • Bioengineering
    • Bioinformatics
    • Biological Circuits
    • +2 more
    Research Interests: Synthetic Biology, Genome Engineering, Systems Biology, Bioengineering, Engineered biomaterials & RNAs
  • Yuval Kluger

    Professor; Pathology
    • Bioinformatics
    Research Interests: Method development and analysis of genomic patters; cancer biomaker discovery; epigenetics
  • Aaron Kuan

    Assistant Professor; Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering
    • Bioinformatics
    • Biological Circuits
    • Computational Biology
    • +2 more
    Research Interests: Electron microscopy and X-ray imaging techniques to enable 3D imaging of neuronal circuits combined with behavior and functional imaging to reveal how circuit connectivity underlies brain activity and cognition.
  • Roy Lederman

    Assistant Professor; Statistics and Data Science
    • Bioinformatics
    • Computational Biology
    • Imaging Biological Systems
    Research Interests: Cryo-EM; numerical analysis and signal processing; geometry of data; computational biology algorithms; mathematics of data science
  • Zongming Ma

    Professor; Statistics and Data Science
    • Bioinformatics
    • Imaging Biological Systems
    Research Interests: Developing machine learning and statistical tools to gain biological insights from spatial and single-cell data
  • Benjamin Machta

    Assistant Professor; Physics
    • Bioinformatics
    Research Interests: Statistical physics of biological systems; critical points and phase transitions, membrane systems
  • Nikhil Malvankar

    Associate Professor; Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry
    • Bioengineering
    • Bioinformatics
    • Biological Circuits
    • +3 more
    Research Interests: We are developing electronic Imaging & Control of Microbial Functions, by studying how environmentally and clinically important microbes build & use hair-like “nanowires” to export electrons outside their cell body, during respiration, communication, and pathogenesis and by tuning nanowire conductivity using light, pressure, temperature, electromagnetic fields, and non-natural ‘click’ chemistry.
  • Simon Mochrie

    Professor; Physics and Applied Physics
    • Bioinformatics
    • Biological Circuits
    • Computational Biology
    • +2 more
    Research Interests: Quantitative microscopy and image analysis. Chromatin organization and dynamics. Nuclear envelope physics. Phase transitions of soft matter
  • Edward Stites

    Associate Professor; Laboratory Medicine & Pathology
    • Bioengineering
    • Bioinformatics
    • Biological Circuits
    • +2 more
    Research Interests: mathematical modeling, informed machine learning, cancer biology/disease biology, systems biology, synthetic biology
  • John Tsang

    Professor; Immunobiology and Biomedical Engineering
    • Bioengineering
    • Bioinformatics
    • Biological Circuits
    • +2 more
    Research Interests: Systems and quantitative immunology; human immunology; single cell biology; predicting and modeling immune responses; synthetic immunology: predictive engineering of immune cell trafficking and sensing; immune homeostasis maintenance and set point establishment mechanisms; integrating dynamical modeling and machine learning to understand emergent immune system behavior across temporal and spatial scales.
  • Paul Turner

    Professor; Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
    • Bioinformatics
    • Computational Biology
    • PEB Leadership
    Research Interests: Evolutionary genetics and genomics of microbes, experimental evolution, virus disease emergence and of virus evolvability, combining microbiology, computational biology, genomics, molecular biology and mathematical-modeling approaches
  • David van Dijk

    Assistant Professor; Medicine (Cardiovascular Medicine) and Computer Science
    • Bioinformatics
    • Computational Biology
    Research Interests: Machine Learning; Computational Biology; Genomics; Single-cell Analysis; Deep Learning; Computational Neuroscience; Machine Learning in biophysics and biochemistry
  • C. Shan Xu

    Professor; Cellular & Molecular Physiology
    • Bioinformatics
    Research Interests: 3D volume electron microscopy, instrumentation development
  • Steven Zucker

    Professor; Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering
    • Bioinformatics
    • Computational Biology
    • Neuroscience
    Research Interests: Computational vision, machine learning of neuroscience data, manifold inference and neural circuits.