People
Amy Williams (CV) is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Brigham Young University. Previously, she was a Senior Scientist at 23andMe and an Associate Professor of Computational Biology at Cornell University. This HAPI-DNA website hosts several tools the lab produced at Cornell (and soon BYU). Below is a list of current and former trainees. Lab publications are available here.
We are recruiting graduate and undergraduate students at BYU with strong computer science skills and an enthusiasm for developing algorithms to infer pedigrees and relatives in large genetic datasets.
Alumni
Siddharth Avadhanam
Siddharth graduated with a Ph.D. in Computational Biology from Cornell University in 2023. His research focused on admixed individuals and he developed a method to infer the ancestry of the parents of admixed individuals and benchmarked state-of-the-art local ancestry inference methods. He came to Cornell with a B.E. in Chemical Engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology of Sciences in India and a Masters degree in Biostatistics from Michigan State University.
Sayantani Basu-Roy
Sayantani was a postdoctoral associate in the lab from Feb 2015-Jan 2017 and worked on a method for inferring the parnet-of-origin of haplotypes using data from a set of siblings. She received her Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Paris-SUD XI in Orsay, France.
Ramya Babu
Ramya did research on relatedness inference in the lab and graduated with an M.S. degree in May 2018.
Arjun Biddanda
Arjun graduated from Cornell University with a B.S. in Computer Science in 2015. He was an undergraduate researcher and worked on comparing methods for detecting identity by descent segments.
Yilei Huang
Yilei was an undergraduate student in the lab interested in population genetics and in particular applications of coalescent theory for demographic inference. He worked on demography-aware relatedness inference techniques.
Melissa Hubisz
Melissa received her Ph.D. in Computational Biology in 2019, and was a co-advisee in the lab (also working with Adam Siepel). She has a B.S. in engineering from Caltech and an M.S. in human genetics from the University of Chicago.
Ryan O’Hern
Ryan graduated from Cornell University with a M.Eng. in Computer Science. He was a research assistant in the lab from August 2015-December 2016 and worked on a method for inferring pedigree relationships using large genotype datasets.
Ying Qiao
Ying graduated with a Ph.D. in Computational Biology from Cornell in 2021. She developed several methods for relatedness inference and reconstructing DNA of parents from siblings. Before coming to Cornell, she received her B.S. degree in in Applied Mathematics from Zhejiang University in China.
Monica Ramstetter
Monica began research in the lab in March 2015 and completed a Ph.D. in 2017, having conducted research on methods to infer relationships between individuals.
Jens Sannerud
Jens graduated with a Ph.D. in Genetics, Genomics, and Development from Cornell University in 2023. He developed a method for inferring the sex of the parent that connects half-sibling or grandparent-grandchild pairs. He received his Sc.B. in Applied Mathematics and Biology from Brown University.
Daniel N. Seidman
Daniel received his Ph.D. in Computational Biology from Cornell in 2022. His worked focused on algorithmic design and implementation for analysis of genetic data. He received a B.S. in Computational Biology from Brown University.