Angshuman Bagchi Postdoctoral Research Fellow I had been working as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Sean Mooney’s lab at the Indiana University School of Medicine for more than a year, before continuing to the Buck Institute. My research area is prediction of protein-protein interactions and their impact on causing genetic diseases. I got my PhD in structural biology from Bose Institute, India. Ari Berman Postdoctoral Research Fellow I received a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of Texas at Austin in 2005. My graduate project was to investigate the inheritance of alcoholism by looking at alterations in brain gene expression during exposure, withdrawal, and recovery of chronic alcohol exposure in mice. This project generate a large amount of data, leading me to develop analysis software to handle it. Since my gradute project was heavily computational, I decided to follow up with a purely biological postdoctoral fellowship. This endeavor lead me to UCSF under the mentorship of Dr. Raymond A. Swanson. Here, I studied the effects of chronic oxidative stress on dopaminergic neurons and characterized a potentially new mouse model for Parkinson's disease. My combined interest in neurodegenerative disease, the neurobiology of aging, and bioinformatics has led me to a second postdoc in Dr. Mooney's laboratory. Here I intend to develop a cross-species predictive model of aging followed by its incorporation into an aging knowledge base. Uday Evani Bioinformatics Programmer I am a Bioinformatics Programmer in Sean's lab. I am currently enrolled in the Master of Science in Bioinformatics program at the Indiana University, Indianapolis. My interests include developing computational work-flows for the analysis of complex biological processes, visualizing biological data and developing machine learning models. My work at the Buck involves developing a work-flow to search for enriched (aka over represented or enhanced) ontology terms in a list of genes or text. The ontologies we work with range from Gene Ontology, disease terms, to pharmacogenomics. I also like hiking, playing soccer and cricket, kayaking and other outdoor activities. Mathew Fleisch Student Programmer I am a computer science major in C++ programming and I am a programmer in Sean Mooney's lab at the Buck Institute. I have most of my programming experience is in web programming (PHP, MySql, Javascript, HTML, XML, and Flash/Actionscript 2.0/3.0). I like to tinker with microcontrollers and try and think of things that have not been done yet. I also love playing the bass, drums, and guitar in my spare time. Kishore Kamati Research Associate II I help the bioinformatics research with my computer science background. I develop and maintain both frontend and backend of scientific web applications. Here in the lab I use PHP, CakePHP, Perl, MySQL, Javascript, HTML, and CSS. I have experience in C++, Core Java and JSP as well. Previously worked in bioinformatics research division of Tata Consultancy Services, which is a pioneer of software services in India. I like to play around with Adobe photoshop and interested in linux system administration. I have a masters degree in computer applications from Osmania University, India. I like hiking, photography, playing ping pong and collecting currency of world nations. Vidhya Krishnan Postdoctoral Research Fellow Vidhya Krishnan worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Sean Mooney’s lab at the Indiana University School of Medicine for over a year, before deciding to follow him to the Buck Institute. Vidhya's research focuses on computational predictions of understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying human disease based on amino acid substitutions – which mostly involves dealing with public online data. Vidhya got her PhD in Bioinformatics at the University of Leeds in the UK -- her thesis involved predicting protein functional effect of SNP’s (single nucleotide polymorphisms) using machine learning tools. She got her Masters degree in Physics and then continued her research in Bioinformatics. Sean Mooney Associate Professor & Director of Bioinfor. Core Prof. Sean Mooney, PhD is a group leader and the director of the bioinformatics core at the Buck Institute. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor at Indiana University School of Medicine. He develops and applies new solutions to bioinformatic problems in biomedicine. Tal Oron Graduate Student I have a bachelor degree in computer science and Biology from the Hebrew University, Israel, and a passion for both. That is why I feel lucky to work in the Buck Institute, in Bioinformatics, where I can combine those two disciplines. Corey Powell Bioinformatics Scientist Corey was originally drawn to mathematics from an early age, studying theoretical mathematics at U.C. Berkeley and earning a PhD in 1995. His interests shifted to bioinformatics in 2003, and he earned an MS in bioinformatics under the direction of Josh Stuart at U.C. Santa Cruz. His thesis work consisted of the development of a method for finding potential pathway genes given a partial pathway list. He is currently working with members of the Kapahi lab on a computational analysis of untranslated regions for genes in multiple species, and with the Hughes lab on uncovering functional insights from protein-protein interaction networks. Corey also enjoys weightlifting, tennis and screaming at the television during football season. Tobias Wittkop Postdoctoral Research Fellow Tobias Wittkop is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Mooney lab. Tobias got his Masters degree in Mathematics and his PhD in Bioinformatics at the Center for Biotechnology (CeBiTec) at the University of Bielefeld in northwestern Germany. Focusing on the identification of protein families, he developed a clustering model based on a graph modification problem and the concept of transitivity in graphs. He combined existing methods and novel algorithms in the corresponding software framework TransClust, which can be found at http://transclust.cebitec.uni-bielefeld.de. He spent four months as a visiting scientist at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) in Berkeley. In the Mooney lab, Tobias will be working on developing a supervised learning model for discovering and comparing age-related genes and drug screenings.In his spare time he likes to play handball, he also plays the bass guitar. Yi Qiang Zhao Postdoctoral Research Fellow I got my PhD at China Agricultural University and am interested in genome-wide analysis. I like reading, bash and good food (seems not related).