Home
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 efficient and productive.
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.
Read more about the people in our group below:
People
Northwest Labs, B227.65
Danielle is our resident expert in long read sequencing, and works on a variety of challenging genome assembly problems.
Northwest Labs, B227.20
Lei is primarily responsible for developing training and outreach material; she also has a background in metagenomics and microbial ecology.
Prior to 2025, the group also included the Software Operations Core. Their mission 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.
As of February 2025, Software Operations has moved to Research Computing !
Group Alumni
(2024)
Abhro was a visiting student from the Curie Institute in France. He used comparative genomics to study Hi-C maps in Lepidoptera.
(2021-2024)
Former postdoc, Subir works on population and comparative genomics of birds. He is now a postdoc at LMU Munich.
(2021-2024)
Rawan was funded by a collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim, and works on single cell RNA-seq methods.
(2023-2024)
Former full stack developer for instrument facility applications
(2019-2022)
Alexandria primarily worked with the mass spec core and the Woo lab while she was in the group.
(2020-2022)
Scott is now a Scientific Investigator in Computational Biology at GSK.
Former full stack developer currently at Cisco
(2019-2021)
Sara is now an Assistant Professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Canada.
(2019-2021)
Alex is now at the Universidad Complutense Madrid.
(2017-2021)
Juerg worked primarily on proteomics data with the Mass Spec Core and the Melton Lab while he was in the group.
(2018-2020)
Brian is now a departmental data scientist with the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department at Princeton.
(2017-2020)
Yasin is now an Assistant Professor at Ege University in Izmir, Turkey.
(2018-2020)
Tommy is now the Director of Computational Biology at Immunitas Therapeutics.
(2017-2019)
John is now a Data Science and Bioinformatics Team Lead at Merck.
(2017-2018)
Allison is now the Associate Curator of Ornithology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
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
Map