KOMB: Graph-Based Characterization of Genome Dynamics in Microbial Communities
Dr. Advait Balaji
PhD student from 2018 through 2023 (currently Analytics Engineer at Oxy)
Advait (5th year PhD student) obtained a dual degree, B.E Computer Science and MS Biological Sciences from BITS, Pilani in India. During his undergraduate degree, he received the Khorana Scholarship (2016) from the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum and also a thesis fellowship (2017-18) to work at Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai, NY. At Mount Sinai, he worked on creating a Sub-cellular process-based ontology that predicts whole cell function using Natural Language Processing. His research interests are at the intersection of genomic data science and designing efficient algorithms to analyze genomic data.
Dr. Nicolae Sapoval
PhD student
Dr. Sapoval received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rice University in May 2024. Previously he obtained a B.S. degree in Computer Science and a B.S. with Honors in Mathematics from the University of Chicago. At the University of Chicago Nick worked in wireless networks research and later in computational biophysics focusing on conformational transition modeling for insulin degrading enzyme. His current interests are in the areas of computational biology with a focus on genomic data.
Dr. R.A. Leo Elworth
Postdoctoral Scientist from August 2019 through April 2022
Leo (NLM Postdoctoral Fellow, primary mentor Prof. Lauren Stadler, secondary mentor Prof. Todd Treangen) received his PhD in Computer Science at Rice University in 2019 working on statistical modeling of DNA sequence evolution. He was advised by Dr. Luay Nakhleh, the J.S. Abercrombie Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science at Rice. Since joining at Rice, Leo was awarded a graduate research fellowship from the National Library of Medicine, has published work in computational biology in journals such as Bioinformatics, presented research at scientific conferences like RECOMB-CG in Barcelona and WABI in Helsinki, and contributed to a soon to be released book on computational modeling of evolutionary histories of genomes.