Olivar: fully automated and variant aware primer design for multiplex tiled amplicon sequencing of pathogen genomes (preprint)
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.
Bryce Kille
PhD student
Bryce (2nd year PhD student) received his MS in Bioinformatics and BS in Computer Science + Chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As an undergraduate, he worked at Dow Agrosciences in both the computational biology and cheminformatics groups. His projects included developing software for phylogeny analysis and creating models for compound activity prediction. During his Master’s program, Bryce worked in a biochemistry lab developing software for genome mining as well as a on research project for creating bit-wise algorithms for the C++ STL. One of his main interests is casting biological and chemical problems into theoretical computer science questions.
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. 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. Yilei Fu
PhD student from September 2019 through January 2024
Dr. Fu is currently a postdoctoral scientist in the Sedlazeck lab at BCM HGSC. Dr. Fu received his Ph.D. from Rice University in December 2023. Previously, Yilei (4th year PhD student) obtained B.E. degrees in Computer Science and Technology from Harbin Institute of Technology, China. During his undergraduate procedure, he receive National People’s Scholorship for 3 times. In the meantime, he also worked on detecting SV(structure variation) on human genomes using third generation sequencing data. His research interest can be briefly discribed as exploring gene-carried information using third/next generation sequencing data.