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About us

The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences Informatics Group (FAS Informatics) is a small group of scientists and software developers working to advance research and teaching by facilitiating computational analysis of scientific data, primarily in biology. We work closely with data-generating scientific cores and with students, postdocs, and faculty generating data to help make research and discovery effficient and productive. You can read more about who we are and what we do below.

Bioinformatics

The mission of the Bioinformatics Core includes training, consulting, and research. We run workshops on a variety of subjects of interest to researchers at Harvard and beyond, focusing on introductory and intermediate topics designed to introduce scientists to tools and techniques for the computational analysis of biological big data. We provide one-on-one advice to individuals or lab groups who need assistance with figuring out bioinformatics approaches or debugging computational methods. We conduct research, both grant-funded and as part of collaborations with labs on campus, with a general focus on method development and best practices investigations to meet the needs of the research community.

Director of Bioinformatics
Northwest Labs, B227.10

Tim runs the Bioinformatics group. While his background is population and comparative genomics, these days he does a little bit of everything.

Senior Bioinformatics Scientist
Northwest Labs, B227.30

Adam is our resident expert in genome annotation and RNA-seq analysis, and also has a background in population and conservation genetics.

Danielle Khost, Ph.D.
Senior Bioinformatics Scientist
Northwest Labs, B227.65

Danielle is our resident expert in long read sequencing, and works on a variety of challenging genome assembly problems.

Senior Bioinformatics Scientist
Northwest Labs, B227.65

Gregg develops phylogenetic methods and has studied convergent evolution, molecular evolution of rodents and insects, and mutation rates in primates.

Lei Ma, Ph.D.
Senior Bioinformatics Scientist
Northwest Labs, B227.20

Lei is primarily responsible for developing training and outreach material; she also has a background in metagenomics and microbial ecology.

Rawan Olayan, Ph.D.
Senior Bioinformatics Scientist
Northwest Labs, B227.40

Rawan is funded by a collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim, and works on single cell RNA-seq methods.

Postdoctoral Fellow
Northwest Labs, B227.65

Subir works on population and comparative genomics of birds, funded by an NIH grant to study enhancer evolution in birds.

Katya Osipova, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
Northwest Labs, B227.65

Katya works on convergent evolution of brood parasitic birds, funded by an NSF grant to study the genomics of these species.

Software Operations

The mission of the Software Operations Core is to support the needs of data generation core facilities by developing software infrastructure. This includes everything from data processing pipelines, to instrument scheduling and training, to billing and invoicing.

Aaron Kitzmiller, Ph.D.
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Director of Software Operations
Northwest Labs, B227.70

Journeyman wrangler of science adjacent software projects

David D'Antonio
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Senior Web Developer
Northwest Labs, Remote

Front end developer for instrument facility applications

Nathan Weeks
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Applications Professional
Northwest Labs, B227.30

Scientific applications specialist

Jared Vessella-Smith
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Applications Professional
Northwest Labs, B227.40

Full stack developer for instrument facility applications

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Group Alumni

Allison Shultz
(2017-2018)

Allison is now the Associate Curator of Ornithology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Brian Arnold
(2018-2020)

Brian is now a departmental data scientist with the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department at Princeton.

Ming "Tommy" Tang
(2018-2020)

Tommy is now the Director of Computational Biology at Immunitas Therapeutics.

Scott Van Buren
(2020-2022)

Scott is now a Scientific Investigator in Computational Biology at GSK.

Juerg Straubhaar
(2017-2021)

Juerg worked primarily on proteomics data with the Mass Spec Core and the Melton Lab while he was in the group.

John Gaspar
(2017-2019)

John is now a Data Science and Bioinformatics Team Lead at Merck.

Yasin Kaymaz
(2017-2020)

Yasin is now an Assistant Professor at Ege University in Izmir, Turkey.

Alexandria D'Souza
(2019-2022)

Alexandria primarily worked with the mass spec core and the Woo lab while she was in the group.

Sara Smith Wuitchik
(2019-2021)

Sara is now an Assistant Professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Canada.

Alex Llanos Garrido
(2019-2021)

Alex is now at the Universidad Complutense Madrid.

Veronika Laine
(2019)

Veronika is now at the Finnish Museum of Natural History working on bats.

Meghan Correa

Former full stack developer currently at Cisco

Andy Bryant

Former front end developer for instrument facility applications

Where to Find Us

We are located in Northwest Science Building, on the B2 floor, near the Bauer Sequencing Core. Our offices are in the B227 suite. We hold regular office hours, and you can also contact us here.

Harvard FAS Informatics Group
Northwest Building B227
52 Oxford Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
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