Research Areas

My research focus is in computational biology, where I develop machine learning and statistical methods to improve our understanding of the biological circuitry that underlies living organisms and how its dysregulation may lead to disease. More specifically, I have worked on modeling tissue and cell type specificity as well as disease progression, both by developing general methods (such as semi-supervised network integration) and in applying them to decipher the molecular underpinnings of diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and rheumatoid arthritis. An important facet of my research is building intuitive, interactive systems as interfaces to the models and predictions that I develop, and I have built such systems whenever appropriate. For example, check out my cell-type-specific functional networks for human neurons relevant to Alzheimer’s, tissue-gene expression pattern predictions in the worm, or crowdsourcing game to annotate biological pathways.