Research Interests

My primary position is with the Institute for Genome Sciences, University of Maryland School of Medicine. I am part of an exceptional team developing automated pipelines for DNA sequence analysis that utilize cloud computing infrastructures such as Amazon EC2 and DIAG. This software has the potential to save labs tens of thousands of dollars per year in computing costs. For more information visit http://clovr.org.

My PhD research largely focused on the development of novel methods for analysis of metagenomic and 16S rRNA sequence data i.e. DNA or RNA from complex microbial communities. I've also been fortunate to lead the computational analysis of several projects characterizing environments such as the human gut, the surfaces of sensitive crops (e.g. apples, tomatoes), and sediment below the sea floor. Please see my CV for additional information.

Below is a brief list of my interests:

• Metagenomics & 16S rRNA analysis
• Genomics of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and other pathogens
• Statistical modeling
• Scientific visualization
• Cloud computing
• Genome assembly
• Algorithms for neural prosthetics
• Computational protein folding
• Nonlinear dynamics

Collaborations

Some of the groups I've worked with:

• Jennifer Biddle - Astrobiology/Marine Biosciences - University of Delaware
• Chris Walsh's lab/Adriana Telias - Plant Sciences - University of Maryland
• Michael Morowitz - Pediatric diseases - Childrens Hospital of Pittsburgh
• Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab - Neural prosthetics group
• Mihai Pop's lab - Metagenomics/Bioinformatics - University of Maryland
• James A. Yorke's group - Genome assembly - University of Maryland