SARS-CoV-2 genomic diversity and the implications for qRT-PCR diagnostics and transmission
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. Yunxi Liu
PhD student
Dr. Liu received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rice University in May 2024. Previously, Louis (4th year PhD student) obtained a B.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Houston and a B.S. degree in Pharmacology from China Pharmaceutical University. During his undergraduate in UH, he did research in the Pattern Analysis Laboratory on image feature extraction. His current research interests include computational biology, metagenomics, and data science.
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.
Dr. Qi Wang
PhD student from September 2018 through January 2022 (currently Sr. Bioinformatics Scientist at Illumina)
Dr. Wang is a Bioinformatics Scientist at Illumina, and finished her PhD in the Treangen Lab December 2021. Previously, Dr. Wang obtained B.S. degrees in Biotechnology from Hong Kong Baptist University and MS in Biotechnology from Northwestern University. During her undergraduate, she did research in University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing University of Chemical Technology and Capital Medical University, focusing on using bioinformatics and experimental approaches to solve various life science problems, including synthetic biology, developmental biology, oncology and drug discovery. Her interest is to improve human health and environment by understanding complex biology data.