Faculty
Faculty members involved with the Bioinformatics and Genomics graduate program are at the vanguard of research in the biological sciences. Hailing from more than a dozen departments across Penn State, these faculty advisers collaborate to conduct research and to train graduate students. The community they have created provides a positive, collaborative environment that helps to position graduate students for career success.
Anton Nekrutenko
Dorothy Foher Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Chair in Genomics, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Evolution of overlapping reading frames in eukaryotic genomes.
Edward O’Brien
Professor of Chemistry
Developing and applying Physical Bioinformatic techniques to measure rates of translation transcriptome-wide and their molecular origins as relates to fundamental biology and disease.
Denise Okafor
Huck Early Career Chair in Biophysics, Assistant Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Structural mechanisms of signaling and regulation in protein complexes.
Andrew Patterson
Professor and Huck Chair of Molecular Toxicology; Faculty Oversight, Metabolomics Core Facility
The Patterson lab is focused on understanding the host-metabolite-microbiome axis
George Perry
Professor of Anthropology and Biology
Anthropological genomics, paleogenomics, human body size evolution, parasite evolution, and evolutionary medicine.
Elizabeth Proctor
Associate Professor of Neurosurgery and of Pharmacology
Systems biology of complex disease. Integration of heterogeneous data types across length scales.
Tanya Renner
Associate Professor of Entomology
Evolution of chemical and structural defense. Molecular evolution, evolutionary genomics, and transcriptomics. Origins and evolution of carnivorous plants.
Howard Salis
Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering; Associate Professor of Agricultural and Biological Engineering
Engineering microorganisms for applications in synthetic biology and metabolic engineering.
Stephen Schaeffer
Professor of Biology
Population Genetics and Genomics of Chromosomal Rearrangements in Drosophila
Mingfu Shao
Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering
Our research interests are designing algorithms and developing methods for solving the various challenging problems in biology using combinatorial optimization and machine learning approaches. Current research topics include: transcript assembly, RNA-seq quantification, single-cell RNA-seq, computational cancer biology, genome rearrangements, protein folding.
Mark Shriver
Professor of Biological Anthropology
Human population genomics and complex disease mapping.
Justin Silverman
Assistant Professor of Information Sciences and Technology
Statistical methods for the analysis of biomedical data (or any other interesting data/questions)
Aleksandra Slavkovic
Huck Chair in Data Privacy and Confidentiality; Professor of Statistics and of Public Health Sciences
Methodological developments in the area of data privacy and confidentiality in the context of small and large scale surveys, health, genomic, and network data.
Moriah Szpara
Professor of Biology
How genetic variation influences the outcomes of viral infection, particularly for neurotropic viruses such as herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) and HSV-2, using high-throughput sequencing, comparative genomics, neuronal cultures, and genetic manipulation of both host and pathogen.
Zachary Szpiech
Assistant Professor of Biology
Population and evolutionary genetics, with applications to medical genetics, anthropology, and conservation