People

We welcome people with diverse backgrounds. It does not matter if you are an experimental biologist, computational scientist, or a machine learning researcher. We respect curiosity, hard work, and most importantly, the ability to ask challenging questions.

There are always open positions that may be of interest. Do drop in an email [my last name followed by ‘a’]@anl.gov if you are interested in joining us.

Collaborators

Post-docs

Dr. Heng Ma: is joining us from Oak Ridge National Laboratory. His research is in the areas of multi-scale molecular simulations and high performance computing. He develops machine learning driven approaches to automatically coarse-grain simulations and run them at scale using novel workflow techniques.

Dr. Carla Mann: joined us from Iowa State. Her research focuses on developing machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques for secure bio systems design.

Dr. Gautham Dharuman: joined us from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Michigan State University. His focus will be on building out our automated end-to-end biological programs from the perspective of new machine learning and AI tools that will be needed to support such large-scale experimentation.

Dr. Michael Irwin: joins us from Vanderbilt University (with Dr. Carlos Lopez). His research is aligned with the use of automated lab techniques to study fundamental variations in complex biological pathways, especially related to how CRISPR/Cas9 probes can induce new functions/ phenotypes while ‘securely disarming’ after their function is executed.

Graduate students

Priyanka V. Setty: University of Chicago, Computer science. Her focus is on using machine learning and AI tools for automating biological experiments. She is currently a Ph.D. student in computer science at the University of Chicago, working with Dr. Ian Foster.

Alexander Brace: University of Michigan, pre-doctoral student. His focus is on building AI/robotics tools for biological experimental design. Alex is an incoming Ph.D. student in the computer science department at the University of Chicago and will be working with Dr. Ian Foster.

Max Zvyagin: University of Chicago, pre-doctoral student. Max is building novel approaches to build scalable hyperparameter optimization tools and working with deep learning for multimodal datasets.

Anda Trifan: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Anda is using our AI driven MD simulation frameworks to study large-scale conformational transitions in several proteins, including Ras and the SARS-Cov-2 viral Spike protein. She is a student of Emad Tajkhorshid and has spent her DOE-CSGF internship here at Argonne.

Defne Gorgun: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Defne is working on using our AI-driven MD framework to study mechanisms of antimicrobial peptides as they interact with bacterial membranes and is currently working towards integrating cryo-EM imaging data into our simulation framework. She is also a student of Emad Tajkhorshid.

Former Post-docs

Dr. Debsindhu Bhowmik : is a computational scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. His research in our group spanned the intersection of deep learning, molecular dynamics and neutron scattering techniques to study disordered protein systems.