The week of September 16-20 is National Postdoc Appreciation Week. The Data Science Institute (DSI) and its Center for Computational Molecular Biology (CCMB) and Center for Technological Responsibility, Re-imagination, and Redesign (CNTR) have a set of amazing postdocs who are doing a range of research. This week, we are highlighting our postdocs and their impactful work!
Eysa Lee is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at DSI and CNTR under the mentorship of Anna Lysyanskaya. Her research focuses on practical cryptographic protocols and, more recently, privacy-preserving digital authentication.
Mia Miyagi is an NSF postdoctoral fellow at CCMB working with Emilia Huerta-Sanchez. Mia is interested in using coalescent theory and simulations to disentangle the genomic signals of gender-biased and sex-biased demographic events and exploring how gendered effects can create illusory signs of sex differences in humans.
Xavier Roca Rada is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at CCMB working with Emilia Huerta-Sanchez. His research focuses on human ancient DNA, specifically exploring the genetic diversity of Colonial period Mexico.
Tiziano Rotesi is an applied microeconomist, with a primary focus on political economy. He is interested in the mechanisms that guide how individuals interpret data, form beliefs, and evaluate policies.
Hilarie Sit is a Provost’s STEM Postdoctoral Fellow at DSI and DEEPS. She is currently working with Karianne Bergen on scientific machine learning research in climate science
Gunjan Singh is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at CCMB working with Erica Larschan. She is interested in understanding molecular mechanisms of sex-specific brain aging using multi-omics approaches.
Jack Doerner is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at DSI.
Andrew VanderWerf is a postdoc in Applied Mathematics and at DSI. He is currently working on some problems in chip firing, which is a discrete form of diffusion on graphs. He’s particularly interested in patterns that emerge in the diffusion of a large number of chips placed at a single site on the integer lattice, and how these patterns self-organize to form a stable limiting distribution as the number of chips increases.
Eugene (Yevgeniy) Raynes is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at CCMB working with David Rand.
Nasim Sonboli is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at DSI and CNTR working with Suresh Venkarasubramanian. Her research interests are the societal aspects of machine learning algorithms, algorithmic fairness, recommender systems, GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations), and general machine learning.
Dafne Zorzetto is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at DSI working with Roberta De Vito. Her research focuses mainly on the development of new Bayesian methods and models for causal inference. Almost all of my methods arise from real-world data problems to understand the causal relationship between environmental policy, air pollution, and public health.
Alex Diaz-Papkovich is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at CCMB working with Sohini Ramachandran. He develops methods to visualize and analyze genetic and environmental data from large and complex biobanks, containing the data from hundreds of thousands of individuals. He also studies how genetic research disseminates on the internet, such as through websites like Wikipedia.
Abebe Fola is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at CCMB working with Jeff Bailey on "Population Genomics, Drug and Diagnostic Resistance of Malaria Parasites". He has a strong passion for combining genetics, genomics, and epidemiological information to better understand malaria transmission dynamics, emergency and spread of drug resistance to guide malaria elimination efforts.
Xiran Liu is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at CCMB working with Sohini Ramachandran. She is working on developing machine-learning-based methods to analyze associations between genetic variants and multiple traits in large-scale biobank datasets.
Karamoko Niaré is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at CCMB working with Jeff Bailey. He works on malaria, studying the genetic diversity of Plasmodium falciparum and its impacts on naturally acquired and vaccine-induced immunity.
Varun Khurana is a postdoc in Applied Mathematics and at DSI. His primary research interests lie in the applications of optimal transport in machine learning, with emerging interests in neural network theory and analysis. Specifically, he researches machine learning methods for measure-valued data using optimal transport and neural network two sample testing.
Along with our DSI/CCMB/CNTR postdocs, DSI also maintains a large community of affiliated postdocs from other departments who work regularly with data science. Here are some of the postdocs from across the university to whom data science is an integral part of their work!
(If you would like to join the DSI-affiliated postdoc community, contact Karianne Bergen)
- Pierre Chabert’s (DEEPS) research focuses on sea level extremes along New England, investigating their atmospheric drivers and impacts on the coastline using very high resolution ocean models.
- Sonam Sherpa (DEEPS) uses novel remote sensing (radar and others) technologies to observe the Earth. At Brown, she is using NASA/CNES/CSA SWOT (Surface Water and Ocean Topography) satellite missions to observe water and the proglacial environment for water availability and hazards.
- Madhurima Choudhury (Physics) is a postdoc at the Center for Fundamental Physics of the Universe, mostly working with Johathan Pober. Her field of interest is cosmology with the 21cm line of neutral Hydrogen. Detection of this redshifted 21 cm signal is one of the key science goals of several existing (e.g. GMRT, LOFAR, MWA, PAPER, HERA, etc) and the upcoming (SKA) radio telescopes. She works primarily on applying machine learning techniques to extract the faint 21cm signal from mock observational datasets, developing parameter inference methods and also understanding and quantifying the effects of the observing instrument and systematics on the data. She is interested in studying the evolution of the Universe over cosmic time utilizing the different cosmological and astrophysical probes.
- Nick Cauldron (Molecular Microbiology & Immunology) researches population genomics and evolution of human fungal pathogens. Currently, his focus is to identify drug resistance mechanisms and characterize local outbreaks of Candida auris.
- Alyssa Cavalier (Molecular Biology, Cell Biology & Biochemistry) is a postdoc in Bess Frost's lab studying dsRNA-induced inflammation and astrocyte reactivity in tauopathy.
- Gayathri Garimella (Computer Science) focuses on building privacy-enhancing technologies that enable secure data sharing, computation, and analysis among distrusting parties. Her work leverages cryptographic techniques that provide strong mathematical guarantees of data privacy and security.