Current PhD Students

Student Leadership

Student Chairs

Elections for new student chairs are held in in the spring semester for terms that start in June. The faculty mentors for each chair are listed in parentheses.

  • Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Chair: Huan Li (Mary-Anne “Annie” Hartley)
  • Outreach Chair: Donglu Bai (David van Dijk)
  • Peer Mentorship Chair: Wes Lewis (Robert McDougal)
  • Social Chair: Jessica Kasamoto (Jeffrey Townsend)

Student Government

  • GSA Representatives: Aarthi Venkat and Jess Graham

Student Organizing Committee

  • Ruiqi Li and Burhan Sabuwala

Pranav Kantroo - Wagner lab & Machta lab (2017)
Rihao Qu - Kluger lab & Flavell lab (2017) | ORCID: 0000-0002-8258-8287

Rihao’s research interests include high-throughput sequencing analysis and immunogenomics. He is working on developing computational and statistical methods to process high-dimensional single cell sequencing data and help understand the genetic mechanisms underlying immune pathways.

Edel Aron - Kleinstein lab (2018) | ORCID: 0000-0002-8683-4772
Edel Aron's picture

Edel’s research is focused on developing a novel computational method capable of incorporating information from multiple forms of single-cell RNA sequencing in order to improve clustering and cell type annotation accuracy. This method will allow for deeper exploration of the host immune response at the cellular level.

Jeff Mandell - Townsend lab (2018) | ORCID: 0000-0002-3839-2543
Jeff Mandell's picture

Jeff is currently studying the somatic evolution of cancer with the goal of guiding treatment plans and drug development. More broadly, Jeff is interested in developing tools and methods to organize large amounts of heterogeneous genomics data into coherent biological knowledge.

Jeremy Gygi - Kleinstein lab (2019) | ORCID: 0000-0001-8567-7472
Jeremy Gygi's picture

Jeremy is interested in developing novel holistic computational methods that work with multi-omics datasets. Specifically, he is working on improving multi-omic data integration through the use of latent factor models.

Wes Lewis - Kluger lab (2019) | ORCID: 0000-0002-1192-8862
Wes Lewis's picture

Wes studies cellular subtype localization and representation learning in single cell RNA sequencing and other high dimensional data types. He is currently working on differential analysis approaches and clustering-free/unsupervised annotation methods that extend existing analytical pipelines for scRNA-seq and scATAC-seq data.

Yaroslav Markov - Higgins-Chen lab (2019) | ORCID: 0000-0001-8778-4909
Yaroslav Markov's picture

Yaroslav is studying the molecular mechanisms behind organismal aging with the ultimate goal of developing strategies to modulate this universal process. He is especially interested in the role of somatic mutations in age-related dysregulation of gene expression and uses machine learning to better understand it.

Eric Ni - Gerstein lab (2019) | ORCID: 0000-0002-4530-0707

Eric is interested in applications of image processing and deep learning techniques for genome privacy and cryo-EM. He is currently working on analysis of privacy leakage from histopathology images and development of upscaling algorithms for cryo-EM structures.

Vimig Socrates - Brandt lab (2019) | ORCID: 0000-0001-7955-9875
Vimig Socrates's picture

Vimig is interested in clinical knowledge representation, NLP, and patient representations. He is currently working on a project in automated EHR data curation.

Andrea Tamminga - Cotsapas lab (2019) | ORCID: 0000-0001-9049-0928
Andrea Tamminga's picture

Andrea’s focus is on determining the effects of gonadocorticoid levels on the risk of developing autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, as well as understanding the fundamental differences in immune function between males and females.

Aarthi Venkat - Krishnaswamy lab (2019) | ORCID: 0000-0003-0298-0172
Aarthi Venkat's picture

Aarthi is interested in developing improved methods to study cancer immunogenomics. To this end, her research focuses on machine learning and graph-based methods that leverage the rich properties of single-cell RNA sequencing data.

Mamie Wang - Kleinstein lab & Kluger lab (2019) | ORCID: 0000-0002-3453-7805
Mamie Wang's picture

Mamie is interested in computational immunology and developing new methods for analyzing single-cell datasets to better understand immune responses. Currently, she is working on projects investigating how B cells respond to flu vaccination. 

Junchen Yang - Kluger lab (2019) | ORCID: 0000-0003-0988-1564

Junchen’s major interest is developing and applying computational methods to analyze high-dimensional transcriptomic data. He is also interested in tackling emerging sequencing protocol-oriented questions.  Currently, he is working on cell-interaction interpretations from single-cell RNA-sequencing data, and feature selection problems using novel deep learning methods.

Biqing Zhu - Zhao lab (2019) | ORCID: 0000-0002-7428-6297
Biqing Zhu's picture

Biqing’s research focuses on single cell data modeling and analysis to better understand its underlying structure and find biologically meaningful signals. And she is currently working on developing statistical methods to conduct CyTOF data clustering through multi-omics data deconvolution. 

Sarah Dudgeon - Schulz lab (2020)
Noah Yann Lee - Kleinstein lab (2020) | ORCID: 0000-0001-9309-8585
Noah Yann Lee's picture
Jason Liu - Gerstein lab (2020) | ORCID: 0000-0001-7197-7319

Jason’s research focuses on leveraging genomics and biosensor/wearable data to better understand disorders and diseases related to the brain. Specifically, he uses novel deep learning and statistical approaches to find the underlying biological differences between various phenotypes.

A Ram - Altice lab & Crawford lab (2020) | ORCID: 0000-0002-7138-8423

A works on policy-oriented approaches to addressing the opioid crisis in Connecticut. Specifically, they focus on developing more effective alternatives to Connecticut’s existing opioid overdose spike alert system, which automatically detects high overdose rates and prompts overdose prevention efforts from health systems, harm reduction organizations and other health professionals. They use modern causal inference and space-time regression techniques, and work closely with mixed-methods and qualitative researchers and community stakeholders to ensure that their work will have the intended impact in their community.

Raghav Sehgal - Higgins-Chen lab (2020)
Raghav Sehgal's picture

Raghav’s research focuses on understanding Human Aging. Through his research Raghav is trying to answer critical questions such as “What are the biological systems and processes driving human aging?”, “How can we measure biological aging?”, “Can we reverse the processes driving Aging?” and “How does Aging give rise to diseases like Cancer, Diabetes, Alzheimer’s and more?”. To answer these questions, Raghav is building deep learning tools and techniques using multi-omic (Epigenetics, Transcriptomics, Proteomics, Metabolomics et al) and multi-modal data (Whole body and Organular Biomarkers, Tissue Omics and Single-Cell Omics).

Michelle Yu - Gerstein lab (2020) | ORCID: 0000-0003-0307-530X
Philip Adejumo - Khera lab (2021)
Kriti Agrawal - Kluger lab & Flavell lab (2021) | ORCID: 0000-0002-5778-6118
Kriti Agrawal's picture

Kriti’s research interests are focused on developing novel computational methods to improve the processing and understanding of single cell data. She is especially interested in creating tools to analyze immunological data to better understand the mechanisms underlying disease. 

Donglu Bai - Gerstein lab (2021) | ORCID: 0000-0002-4800-732X
Donglu Bai's picture

Donglu is currently working on a joint model of cell-type-specific RNA and protein expressions in the human brain to shed light on biological discrepancies between cell-type-specific mRNA and protein levels. Donglu is also focusing on using machine learning models to better understand the interplay between metabolic pathways, histone modifications and gene expression across cell types. Her research interests also include studying protein conformational change and dynamics.

Yuhang Chen - Gerstein lab (2021) | ORCID: 0000-0001-9906-4108
Andy Chu - Gerstein lab (2021)
Mingze Dong - Kluger lab & Fan lab (2021) | ORCID: 0000-0001-7367-6819

Mingze is interested in developing novel computational methods to analyze single-cell/spatial omics datasets, drawing inspiration from advancements in machine learning and statistics. Currently, he is working on causal inference methods and graph neural network based approaches for spatial omics datasets.

Cole Jensen - Kleinstein lab (2021) | ORCID: 0000-0001-9236-4853
Cole Jensen's picture

Cole Jensen is a computational biologist with an epidemiology, statistics, and evolutionary biology background. His research interests include developing computational evolutionary biology, population statistics, and graph-based approaches for studying B-cell biology.

Andrew Jia - Cotsapas lab (2021)
Yunzhe Jiang - Gerstein lab (2021) | ORCID: 0000-0001-8768-0050
Huan Li - Melnick lab (2021) | ORCID: 0000-0001-7541-7052
Ruiqi Li - Kluger lab (2021) | ORCID: 0000-0002-9053-1678
Ruiqi Li's picture

Ruiqi’s research interests revolve around developing computational approaches for analyzing single cell data. She is currently focusing on cluster-independent marker feature identification, utilizing graph-based unsupervised learning methods, to gain deeper insights into cellular heterogeneity.

Jake Sumner - O'Hern lab (2021) | ORCID: 0000-0002-5000-8292
Jake Sumner's picture
Jake Sumner is a graduate student in the O’Hern lab currently working on decoy detection for protein-protein complexes. He has also worked on: MD simulations of proteins, polymer simulations, and analyzing the physical surface properties of proteins. 
Xin Xin - Gerstein lab & Krumholz lab (2021) | ORCID: 0000-0002-0223-923X
Dingyao Zhang - Gerstein lab (2021)
Ardavan Abiri - Chen lab (2022) | ORCID: 0000-0003-3021-6147
Ardavan Abiri's picture
Jenel Fraij Armstrong - Higgins-Chen lab (2022) | ORCID: 0009-0001-4401-0986
Jenel Fraij Armstrong's picture
Jess Graham - Braun lab (2022) | ORCID: 0000-0003-2962-6763
Jess Graham's picture
Ao Huang - Tsang lab (2022) | ORCID: 0000-0001-6215-3908
Ao Huang's picture
Jessica Kasamoto - Higgins-Chen lab (2022) | ORCID: 0000-0002-4604-6093
Jessica Kasamoto's picture
Keyi Li - Kluger lab & Fan lab (2022) | ORCID: 0000-0001-7421-0121
Tianyu Liu - Zhao lab (2022)
Chang Lu - Kluger lab (2022) | ORCID: 0000-0003-0169-529X
Chang Lu's picture
Burhan Sabuwala - Kleinstein lab (2022) | ORCID: 0000-0001-7291-3923
Burhan Sabuwala's picture
Anna Su - Gerstein lab & Brock lab (2022) | ORCID: 0000-0001-7702-5044
Anna Su's picture
Weihao Zhao - Gerstein lab (2022) | ORCID: 0000-0002-7480-8112
Suchen Zheng - Gerstein lab (2022) | ORCID: 0000-0003-3703-1970
Trevor Brokowski - (2023)
Christine Dien - (2023)
Kevin Jin - (2023) | ORCID: 0000-0002-9217-4803
Kevin Jin's picture
Xinyun Li - (2023)
Yuntian Liu - (2023)
Aatmik Mallya - (2023)
Leona Wang - (2023)
Lucy Zheng - (2023)