Field Faculty
The PhD Program in Computational Biology is currently comprised of 25 graduate students and 26 field faculty from an array of research areas. We encourage you to explore the field faculty to get a better understanding of what is offered in the CB PhD Program.

Computational genetics; Functional genomics of plant interactions with plant pathogenic bacteria; Role of TAL effects in plant disease and applications for disease control and DNA targeting, including genome editing

Statistical topics ranging from the bootstrap and Monte Carlo methods, clustering, exact inference, mixed models, generalized linear models, applications of the saddlepoint and Laplace approximations and model fitting algorithms.

Computational biology; Computational genetics; Genetics of adaptation and domestication; Bioinformatics

Population genetics, bacterial genomics, human microbiome, systems biology

Functional genomic approaches to dissect complex traits in grasses, cassava, and wide range of other crops; focused on combining the basic science of the molecular basis of natural variation with applied breeding

My research interests are broadly in the epidemiology of zoonotic diseases, evidence-based medicine, and One-Health. Recently, I have been developing methods to improve antimicrobial resistance surveillance and track multidrug resistance. I use classical statistical methods, mathematical modeling, and machine learning to answer research questions.

Molecular and theoretical population genetics; molecular evolution; Drosophila evolutionary biology

Computational neuroscience, olfactory sensory processing, neural coding and representation; learning and memory systems, neuromorphic algorithms
Biomedical Sciences; gene regulation, functional genomic "next generation" sequencing data
Precision medicine; single-cell genomics; circulating cell-free DNA; genomic medicine

Plant disease sensing; asymptomatic disease detection; remote sensing; proximal sensing; in situ and imaging spectroscopy; machine & deep learning
Basic metabolism in ruminants and genetics to veterinary epidemiology, economic modeling and food safety
Computational and experimental approaches to understand the structure of metabolic networks

DNA replication timing programs using applied genomic approaches, integrating experimental and computational biology

Quantitative neuroimaging of neurological disorders, including multiple sclerosis, stroke, traumatic brain injury and disorders of consciousness

Epigenomic approaches to understanding the mechanisms of gene regulation in eukaryotic systems. We focus on combining genomics with bioinformatic algorithm development to deconvolute the eukaryotic regulatory network.
Neuroscience, neural coding, neuromodulation, olfactory sensory processing, and the neural bases of learning and memory processes
Gene expression, gene regulation, molecular biology, molecular genetics, Rna aptamers, Rna splicing, transcription

Evolutionary genomics of rice

Population genetics, computational evolutionary biology, evolutionary theory, genetics of rapid adaptation

Quantitative genetics/genomics; statistical genetics; computational biology; pathway modeling; molecular evolution

Plant biology, evolutionary genomics, computational biology, metabolomics, natural product discovery

Systems biology, regulatory and signaling networks, biological information processing, and dynamics of complex systems

Computational approaches that investigate gene regulation in yeast and human epigenomes

Applying quantitative genetics, genomics and computational science to improve the efficiency of crop breeding programs and increase understanding of complex traits.
microRNA; gene regulation; genomics/bioinformatics; systems genetics; liver/GI stem cells; liver/GI disease; diabetes, dyslipidemia

Cancer genetics/genomics with a strong focus on the identification and functional characterization of novel predisposing mutations in human cancers.

Quantitative and experimental systems biology; statistical genetics; comparative genomics; machine learning; molecular evolution; disease prognosis analysis