Larry Mays Seminar Series in Bioinformatics

UNC Charlotte’s Department of Bioinformatics and Genomics (BiG) hosts a weekly seminar series named after Dr. Lawrence Mays (Emeritus Faculty). The Larry Mays Seminars in Bioinformatics covers research within Bioinformatics, Genomics, and Computational Biology. Seminars are free and open to the UNC Charlotte community. The seminars are also a one-credit graduate course (BINF-6600 and BINF-8600 combined). Students enrolled in BINF 6600 or BINF 8600 can see course details on Canvas.

Seminars take place on Fridays at 2:30- 3:30 PM. Seminars are hosted from the Bioinformatics building, room 105, and on Zoom.

Announcements

HPC club events

Evolve

Next Evolve meeting will be on Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2025, starting at 3:00 PM, in Bioinformatics, room 217.

Tuan from the Sung Lab will present journal club on Wed at 3pm in Room 217. Click here to access the paper.

Zoom link

The Zoom information for the seminars will be posted here a few minutes before they start.

The Zoom link for Dr. Sean Gibbons’ talk (Feb. 21, 2025) is https://charlotte-edu.zoom.us/j/96312656444 (meeting ID: 963 1265 6444).

Spring 2025

The Larry Mays Seminars in Bioinformatics will be hosted by Dr. Denis Jacob Machado this Spring semester of 2025. Please email him at dmachado@charlotte.edu if you have any questions.

Feb. 21, 2025: “Estimating dietary intake from human fecal metagenomes” with Dr. Sean Gibbons

Dr. Sean Gibbons is a researcher specializing in computational and experimental methods to study host-microbe systems, particularly microbial communities and their roles in health and the environment. He earned his PhD in biophysical sciences from the University of Chicago in 2015, where he explored microbial communities as models for ecological theory, followed by postdoctoral work at MIT developing techniques to analyze eco-evolutionary dynamics in the human gut microbiome. He previously studied microbiology and synthetic biology at Uppsala University in Sweden as a Fulbright Graduate Fellow. Since joining the ISB faculty in 2018, supported by a Washington Research Foundation Distinguished Investigator Award, Gibbons has focused on how microbial ecosystems adapt to environmental changes, especially within the human gut over a person’s lifespan. His lab integrates computational and experimental approaches to investigate interactions between microbial ecology, evolution, and function, aiming to develop personalized interventions for improving human health.

Feb. 14, 2025: “Insect phylogenetics and our shared connection” with Dr. Dominic A. Evangelista

I will overview my research in insect phylogenetics over the last 5 years. I will discuss three approaches to phylogenetics: minimal data phylogenomics, maximal data phylogenomics, and maximum computation phylogenomics. In each, I attempt to improve the phylogeny of cockroaches by optimizing signal-to-noise ratios, managing noise in super-sparse matrices, or minimizing error through intense computation. I will end by discussing tests of phylogenetic support for big questions in the insect phylogeny, using a massive dataset (1k+ species, 1k+ genes).

Feb. 7, 2025: “Are there microbes in venom, and why characterizing them matters for our fundamental understanding of systems biology” with Dr. Sabah Ul-Hasan

Holobiont theory views a given organism and its associated microorganisms as their own universe. Essentially, we are each walking ecosystems. We can consider Earth as an ecosystem in its entirety or scale this down to a single cell and its molecular functions therein, which in essence is systems biology. Focusing specifically on ecosystems through a host-microbe lens, results to date largely revolve around the gut microenvironment. At 50,000 studies and counting, these results have yielded substantial contributions not only to our understanding of microbiology but also evolution and systems as a whole. Even so, we have only begun to scratch the surface of host-microbe systems and our understanding of symbioses. Venom systems have convergently evolved across ~200,000 animal species over hundreds of millions of years and yet venom microbiome studies are < 0.1% of all microbiome studies known. This talk explores the significance of investigating venom microbiomes towards expanding multiomics technologies, new avenues for natural product discovery, and added model systems to game theory.

Click here to see the slide deck for this presentation (last accessed on Feb. 7, 2025).

Jan. 31, 2025: “The physical code in RNA sequences” with Amy Gladfelter (Duke University)

Most amino acids are encoded by multiple codons, making the genetic code degenerate. Synonymous mutations affect protein translation and folding, but their impact on RNA itself is often neglected. We developed a genetic algorithm that introduces synonymous mutations to control the diversity of structures sampled by an mRNA. The behavior of the designed mRNAs reveals a physical code layered in the genetic code. We find that mRNA conformational heterogeneity directs physical properties and functional outputs of RNA-protein complexes and biomolecular condensates. The role of structure and disorder of proteins in biomolecular condensates is well appreciated, but we find that RNA conformational heterogeneity is equally important. This feature of RNA enables both evolution and engineers to build cellular structures with specific material and responsive properties.

Jan. 24, 2025: “Jointly modeling the effects of evolutionary processes on genomic variation” with Dr. Parul Johri (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Population genomic inference currently does not account for the effects of selection across the genome. We propose that an appropriate evolutionary null model, when performing inference, should jointly account for the evolutionary processes known to be in constant operation in natural populations- genetic drift (as modulated by the demographic history of the population), heterogeneity in recombination and mutation rates, and importantly, selection against deleterious mutations. We show how not accounting for such constantly operating processes affects inference in population genetics. We demonstrate a statistical framework for jointly inferring the contribution of the relevant selective and demographic parameters. Our approach represents an appropriate baseline model for inference in population genetics at large, which is necessary to accurately assess the role of adaptive processes in shaping genomic variation. I conclude by discussing our recent efforts in building such evolutionary baseline models for human pathogens to better understand their demographic and selective histories.

Jan. 17, 2025: “Population Genomics in Action: The Fantastic Four Superwomen Leading the Charge in Speciation, Polyploidy, and Domestication Research” with Dr. Arun Sethuraman (San Diego State University)

Work in the Sethuraman Lab focuses on developing new statistical methods, software, and pipelines for understanding population structure, relatedness, speciation, and estimating evolutionary history from population genomic data. Here I will showcase the work of the Sethuraman Lab’s Fantastic Four Superwomen PhD students – (1) Tamsen Dunn’s polyploidy genome simulator and inference framework called SpecKS, (2) Margaret Wanjiku’s series of statistical tests to estimate ghost introgression into extant genomes, (3) Alexandra McElwee-Adame’s work on the genomics of domestication in hops (Humulus lupulus L.), and (4) Raya Esplin-Stout’s pipeline for simulating and testing thousands of coalescent demographic models for use with fastsimcoal28, called CoalMiner.

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Spring Semester Speaker Line-Up

17-Jan-25 (In Person): Dr. Arun Sethuraman

Dr. Arun Sethuraman (phonetic pronunciation: Uh-roon Say-thoo-rah-men) is an Associate Professor of Population Genetics and Bioinformatics at San Diego State University. Dr. Sethuraman is an evolutionary computational geneticist who develops new statistical methods, software, and pipelines to understand speciation, genomic ancestry, and human evolution out of Africa. He is originally from India, where he completed his Undergraduate studies in Computer Science prior to obtaining a Ph.D. in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and Genetics from Iowa State University and an NIH Postdoctoral fellowship at Temple University with Dr. Jody Hey. More recently, he was a Faculty in the Biology Department at Cal State San Marcos. He is a recent recipient of the NSF CAREER and an NIH R15 AREA award and joined the Biology Department as a Faculty and Director of the Biological and Medical Informatics program at San Diego State University in the Fall of 2021. He also currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Genetics Society of America and the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Scholars Program.

24-Jan-25 (In Person): Dr. Parul Johri

Dr. Parul Johri is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in the Department of Biology and the Department of Genetics, with an affiliation in the Integrative Program for Biological and Genome Sciences. Before that, she was a postdoc at Arizona State University, advised by Jeffrey D. Jensen. She earned her PhD in the Evolution, Ecology, and Behavior program at Indiana University, Bloomington, under the supervision of Michael Lynch. Prior to that, she obtained a Master’s in Biology from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, and a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Delhi, India.

31-Jan-25 (In Person): Dr. Amy Gladfelter

Dr. Amy Gladfelter is a quantitative cell biologist interested in fundamental mechanisms of cell organization.  She is a Duke Science and Technology Professor in the Cell Biology and Biomedical Engineering Departments at Duke University.  Previously, she was a Professor of Biology and Associate chair at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 2016-2023.  In her research program, she uses microscopy and biophysical and genetic approaches to study syncytial cells of fungi and placenta. She examines how these large cells spatially organize the cytoplasm via biomolecular condensates and sense their shape.  She trained at Princeton University (AB) with Bonnie Bassler, Duke University (Ph.D.) with Danny Lew, and UniBasel Biozentrum (post-doc) with Peter Philippsen before starting her independent career at Dartmouth in the Biological Sciences department in 2006, where she was until 2016.  She has been honored with the 2014 Graduate Mentoring Award from Dartmouth, the 2015 Mid-Career Award for Excellence in Research from the American Society of Cell Biology, the 2020 Graduate School Mentoring Award from UNC, a 2024 mentoring award at Duke, and was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Faculty Scholar.  She is an elected fellow of AAAS, the American Academy of Microbiology, and the American Academy for Arts and Sciences.

7-Feb-25 (Virtual): Dr. Sabah Ul-Hasan

Dr. Sabah Ul-Hasan (phonetic pronunciation: Sub-buh Ool-Huss-son) is a bioinformatics scientist in biotech. The focus of their talk is rooted in their doctorate studies, where their research resulted in the proposal of venom microbiomics as an emerging field with follow-up findings to be available in a soon-to-be released review paper amongst The Initiative for Venom Associated Microbes and Parasites Consortium (iVAMP). Dr. Ul-Hasan grew up in Salt Lake City as a first generation American to Pakistani and Indian parents. There, they completed BSc (3) degrees in Biology, Chemistry, and Environmental & Sustainability Studies at the University of Utah. Dr. Ul-Hasan went on to complete an MSc in Biochemistry at the University of New Hampshire with an emphasis in Marine Science, a PhD in Quantitative & Systems Biology as a Eugene Cota Robles Fellow at UC Merced, and a joint Postdoctoral Scholar and Bioinformatics Lecturer role at Scripps Research as a NIH NGIMS Fellow. Aside from a laundry list of accolades to garner some form of credibility, Dr. Ul-Hasan is most concerned with being a kinder person than the day before and practicing ego death.  “That little word ‘I’, terrible ‘I’ disease, one of the worst ‘I’ diseases that has even known” – George Washington Carver.

14-Feb-25 (In Person): Dr. Dominic A. Evangelista

Dr. Dominic A. Evangelista is an evolutionary biologist interested in how biodiversity originates through evolutionary processes. Dr. Evangelista’s current research aims to infer phylogenies using genome-scale data, map biological trends over evolutionary histories, and to improve upon phylogenetic methods. Dr. Evangelista’s past research explored palaeoentomology, tropical community ecology, niche evolution, and species delimitation. 

21-Feb-25 (In Person): Dr. Sean Gibbons

Dr. Sean Gibbons received his PhD in biophysical sciences from the University of Chicago in 2015, dual-advised by Jack Gilbert and Maureen Coleman. His graduate work focused on using microbial communities as empirical models for testing ecological theory. Gibbons completed his postdoctoral training in Eric Alm’s laboratory in the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT from 2015-2018. His postdoctoral work focused on developing techniques to quantify individual-specific eco-evolutionary dynamics within the human gut microbiome.
Gibbons was awarded a Fulbright Graduate Fellowship to study microbiology and synthetic biology at Uppsala University in Sweden, where he earned a master’s degree in 2010. His PhD work was supported by an EPA STAR Graduate Fellowship. Upon joining the ISB faculty in 2018, his startup package was supported, in part, by a Washington Research Foundation Distinguished Investigator Award.
Microbial communities are complex (i.e. many interacting species) and adaptive (i.e. evolving). Complex, adaptive systems continually reorganize themselves in response to the environment. Gibbons investigates how the structure and composition of evolving ecological networks of microorganisms change across environmental gradients. In particular, he is interested in how ecological communities in the gut change and adapt to individual people over their lifespans (i.e. host genotype, host development and host behavior) and how these changes impact human health. His lab develops computational and experimental tools for investigating host-associated microbial communities to explore the interactions between ecology, evolution and ecosystem function, applying these insights to develop personalized interventions for improving human health and well-being.d environmental systems.

28-Feb-25 (Virtual): Dr. Raúl González-Pech

Dr. Raúl González-Pech applies computational biology to the study of genome evolution in coral symbionts and related organisms. His research examines how symbiosis drives diversification, revealing the genetic underpinnings of these fascinating relationships.

14-Mar-25 (In Person): Dr. Joaquin C. B. Nunez

Dr. Joaquin C. B. Nunez combines computational, experimental, and multi-omics approaches to explore population genetics and evolutionary genomics. His work addresses questions about rapid evolution, host-pathogen dynamics, and the interplay between demography and selection.

28-Mar-25 (In Person): Dr. Harriet Alexander

Dr. Harriet Alexander uses computational approaches to explore oceanographic questions, focusing on the genetic diversity and ecological roles of plankton in marine ecosystems. Her research combines field studies and bioinformatics to better understand the changing ocean.

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Complete schedule for the Spring of 2025

Date	Speaker’s name	Speaker’s institution	Speaker’s website	Seminar type
17-Jan-25	Dr. Arun Sethuraman	Department of Biology, San Diego State University	http://www.sethuramanlab.com	In person
24-Jan-25	Dr. Parul Johri	University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill	https://www.johrilab.org	In person
31-Jan-25	Dr. Amy Gladfelter	Duke University, Cell Biology	https://gladfelterlab.net	In person
7-Feb-25	Dr. Sabah Ul-Hasan	Biotechnology Industry	https://github.com/ivamp-consortium	Virtual
14-Feb-25	Dr. Dominic A. Evangelista	University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign	https://www.roachbrain.com	In person
21-Feb-25	Dr. Sean Gibbons	Institute for Systems Biology; University of Washington	https://gibbons.isbscience.org	In person
28-Feb-25	Dr. Raúl González-Pech	The University of Queensland, Institute for Molecular Bioscience	https://science.psu.edu/bio/people/rag5851	Virtual
14-Mar-25	Dr. Joaquin C. B. Nunez	University of Vermont	https://www.jcbnunez.org	In person
21-Mar-25	To be determined	To be determined	To be determined	Probably Virtual
28-Mar-25	Dr. Harriet Alexander	Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)	https://alexanderlabwhoi.github.io	In person
11-Apr-25	To be determined	To be determined	To be determined	Probably Virtual
18-Apr-25	To be determined	To be determined	To be determined	Probably Virtual
25-Apr-25	To be determined	To be determined	To be determined	Probably Virtual

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Past seminars

Fall 2024

The Fall 2024 seminars were organized by Dr. Abigail Leavitt LaBella (alabell3@charlotte.edu).

• August 30th (virtual): Dr. Emile Gluck-Thaler, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • Starships: a new frontier for fungal biology
• September 6th (virtual): Dr. Alex Cope, Rutgers University
  • Integrating population genetic models with emerging functional genomic technologies to reveal the rules of proteome evolution
• September 13th (in person): Dr. Danillo Augusto, UNC Charlotte (Department of Biological Sciences)
  • Decoding the Immune System: Insights into Human Disease Susceptibility and Population Genetics
• September 20th (virtual): Dr. Jóse Vargas-Muñiz, Virginia Tech
  • Can targeting the fungal septin cytoskeleton improve existing antifungal therapies?
• September 27th (in person): Dr. Parul Johri, UNC Chapel Hill
• October 4th (in person): Dr. Lawrence Uricchio, Tufts University
• October 11th (virtual): Dr. Matthew Mead, Ginkgo Bioworks
• October 18th (virtual): Dr. Cullen Roth, Los Alamos National Laboratory
• October 25th (in person): Dr. Antonis Rokas, Vanderbilt University
• November 1st (in person): Dr. Xiaojun Ren, UNC Charlotte (Department of Biological Sciences)
• November 8th (in person): Dr. Liesl Jeffers-Francis, NC A&T
• November 15th (in person): Dr. Donald Fox, Duke University
• November 22nd (in person): Dr. Lauren Dineen & Dr. Colby Ford, UNC Charlotte

Spring 2024

• 1/19 (in person): Dr. Aaron Bivins, Lousiana State University
• 1/26 (remote): Dr. Liliana Dávalos, Stony Brook University
• 2/2 (in person): Dr. Morgan Carter, UNC Charlotte (CIPHER)
• 2/9 (in person): Dr. Yaniv Brandvain, University of Minnesota
• 2/16 (in person): Dr. Wynn Meyer, Lehigh University
• 2/23 (in person): Dr. Philipp Brand, Rockefeller University
• 3/1/24 (in person): Dr. Juan Vivero-Escoto, UNC Charlotte (CIPHER)
• 3/8/24: No seminar, Spring Break
• 3/15/24 (in person): Dr. Alejandro Damian-Serrano, University of Oregon
• 3/22/24 TBD
• 3/29/24: No seminar, Refresh Week
• 4/5/24: Dr. Bob Goldstein, UNC Chapel Hill
• 4/12/24: Dr. Meredith Yeager, National Cancer Institute
• 4/19/24: Dr. Elise Lauterbur, University of Arizona
• 4/26/24: No seminar, Spring Break

Zoom link for in-person attendance is available upon request. Please e-mail Dr. Laurel Yohe (lyohe1@uncc.edu) for the link.

Fall 2023

I. September 8, 2023: UNC Charlotte’s HPC student group will introduce a new training module for our research clusters.

The Charlotte HPC Group gave the 9/8 seminar. This new student organization is focused on advancing high-performance computational skills for users of all levels across campus. They do this through various means, including in-person workshops, peer support, and online Canvas training. This day, they briefly showed the new module and told us about some of the other activities they have on the horizon. This seminar was informative for people who are new to the cluster or don’t even have an account and for more experienced users who want to expand their knowledge and find additional resources. The module is already available to the 49er community. Please use this form to request additional information.

II. September 15, 2023: Dr. Ward Wheeler talks about multi-armed bandits, Thompson sampling, and machine learning in phylogenetic graph search, among other topics.

Dr. Ward Wheeler visited in person on 9/15 coming from the Division of Invertebrate Zoology American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY, USA. In his talk, he talked about something cool called the multi-armed bandit problem in the context of phylogenetic graph searching. He uses a technique called Thompson sampling on a bunch of ‘search-bandits’ to help focus on search strategies that work best. This smart random sampling method turns out to be super effective in creating really good phylogenetic graphs, and it’s quicker than other random search methods. It’s like an unsupervised machine learning strategy that we can use on all sorts of phylogenetic data, even if we don’t know much about them beforehand.

III. September 22, 2023: Dr. Lucas Czeck talks about population genetic statistics for the next generation of pool sequencing.

In recent decades, so-called Evolve-and-Resequence (E&R) experiments have become a popular approach to survey rapid evolution of populations over multiple generations. These experiments allow us to measure shifts in the allele frequencies of a population in response to new or shifting environmental conditions, such as a changing climate.

Pool-sequencing of several individuals at once is a cost-effective and efficient tool to obtain reliable allele frequencies from a population of thousands to hundreds of thousands of individuals, and is often used in E&R experiments. However, specialized tools to efficiently analyze these data that take sampling noise stemming from the pool-sequencing approach into account were lacking. We developed two software tools to overcome statistical and bioinformatic challenges arising in this context.

First, we present grenepipe, a workflow from raw sequencing data of individuals or pooled populations to genotypes (variant calling) and population allele frequencies. The pipeline automates trimming, mapping, variant calling, and quality control, with a selection of popular software tools in each of these steps, and produces variant calls and frequency tables. While generally applicable to individual sample data, it offers specialized steps for pool-sequencing. Our software downloads all dependencies and runs all steps automatically using a single command line call, and parallelizes processing for computer cluster environments, allowing large datasets to be analyzed efficiently.

Second, to enable inferences of evolutionary signatures from frequency data, we created grenedalf, a C++ command line tool to compute population genetic statistics. It computes unbiased statistics of Fst, Pi, Tajima’s D with pool-sequencing data, far outperforming alternative tools, and fixing long-standing issues in the existing tools. Further it offers novel data exploration tools such as windowed allele frequency spectrum visualizations based on the allele frequencies, and built-in data filters and manipulations. Apart from its speed, it offers many convenience options, such as reading all standard file formats.

These tools are designed for scalability and ease-of-use with contemporary file formats, which we showcase using the GrENE-net.org project, a large-scale Evolve-and-Resequence experiment with Arabidopsis thaliana from across the world. We will present some preliminary results form that experiment, showcasing the use of the above tools, as well as demonstrating how E&R experiments can be used to investigate rapid evolution under differing environmental conditions such as caused by climate change.

Recommended publications:

• Grenepipe paper.
• Grenedalf preprint (submitted to Bioinformatics).

IV. September 29, 2023: Dr. Cathy Moore (Biosafety Officer at UNC Charlotte’s Division of Research) gives a special presentation.

Dr. Cathy Moore provided Biosafety Training for Graduate Students.

Dr. Moore is the University contact for:

• Handling and working with biological agents on campus
• Institutional Biosafety Committee protocol review and approval process
• Risk assessment and risk mitigation for biological agents and materials
• Use of select agents
• Dual Use of Research Concern
• Biosafety training courses and requirements
• Microbiological and Biomedical facilities renovation and design

V. October 6, 2023: Dr. Viviana Monje-Galvan (University at Buffalo) talks about an atomistic view of protein-lipid interactions at the cell membrane interface.

• Talk description: My research group uses all-atom molecular dynamics to study lipid-lipid and lipid-protein interactions. One of our goals is to determine the role of specific lipid species in disease mechanisms. We specialize in developing realistic membrane models that reproduce the physical environment of a given organism or cell organelle using key lipid species for that particular membrane. In this talk, I will present a protein-membrane study in the context of hepatitis C. Specifically, the molecular signature that results upon protein binding and the associated local membrane response when different lipid species are used to model the membrane. These results help us understand the lateral reorganization of lipids around proteins and the potential impacts of chronic hepatitis C and lipid redistribution, particularly near fat storages of the cell.
• Short Bio: Dr. Monje-Galvan is originally from Bolivia; she completed her undergraduate and graduate studies in Chemical Engineering at the University of Maryland-College Park. She completed her postdoctoral training at the University of Chicago, where she continued strengthening her background in computational biophysics. She started her lab at the University at Buffalo in January 2021, where she leads a diverse group of graduate and undergraduate students. She is actively involved with AIChE and the Biophysical Society, as well as her university, in efforts to promote the participation of women and minorities in science and engineering. She is a board member of LatinXinChE, an affinity group within MAC AIChE, AIChE CoMSEF, and is an active volunteer with the Society for Biophysicists of Latinamerica (SoBLA).

VI. October 13, 2023: Dr. Muhammad Iqbal Qureshi (Public Health Reference Laboratory and Khyber Medical University) gives a talk entitled “Genetic Recombination Potentially Drives Astrovirus Diversity in Camelids.”

VII. October 20, 2023: Dr. Brian Cleary (Assistant Professor at Boston University’s College of Engineering) discusses new technologies and algorithmic experimental designs to study intracellular and intercellular circuits.

VIII. November 3, 2023: Dr. Carla Osthoff Ferreira de Barros (National Laboratory of Scientific Computing, Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation) gives a seminar on developing efficient scientific gateways for supercomputer environments supported by deep learning models.

Dr. Carla Osthoff Ferreira de Barros graduated in Electrical Engineering from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro with a master’s and a doctorate in Computer Engineering Systems from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She is currently a researcher in the area of High-Performance Computing at the National Laboratory for Scientific Computing (LNCC), a professor at the Multidisciplinary Graduate Program at LNCC, a member of the Consultative Committee of the Supercomputer Santos Dumont, coordinates the LNCC National Center for High-Performance Processing (CENAPAD), and the High-Performance Processing Sector of LNCC, which has several collaborative projects in the area of High-Performance Computing. Her research focuses on High-Performance Computing, Parallel Programming, and scientific application performance optimizations.

IX. November 17, 2023: Dr. Grace Wyngaard talks about chromatin diminution and genome stability in a talk that unravels the role of transposable elements in a remarkable adaptation in copepods

Dr. Grace Wyngaard has been working at the “fringes” of science – chromatin diminution in copepods, spending most of her career at James Madison University. This allowed her to pursue what she was most interested in… and only what she was most interested in. It allowed her to take big risks in testing and developing novel hypotheses because she did not have to keep a large lab machine operating each year. In her talk, Dr. Wyngaard will share with us the results of a career in science in which she could work slowly and steed to produce astonishing outcomes.

X. December 1, 2023: Dr. Joshua David Campbell, from Boston University, will give a talk about his work using computational biology and bioinformatics with applications ranging from identifying early drivers of lung cancer to developing therapeutics for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD)

Dr. Joshua D. Campbell is an Associate Professor at Boston University (Division of Computational Biomedicine, Department of Medicine). He is also a member of the BU-BMC Cancer Center and an affiliate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He has received the Boston University Ralph Edwards Career Development Professorship and LUNGevity Career Development Award. He is also a Boston University Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) KL2 Scholar.

Dr. Campbell’s research interests include computational biology and bioinformatics applied to identifying early drivers of lung cancer. He is also interested in the therapeutic development and pathogenesis of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), the 3rd leading cause of death globally (updated in December 2023).