Principal Investigator
Dongwon Lee, Ph.D | Principal Investigator
Dongwon is an assistant professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Nephrology at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He is affiliated with the Manton Center for Orphan Disease Research and is an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Additionally, he is a faculty member of the Harvard Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics (BIG) PhD Program.
Trained as a computational biologist and human geneticist with expertise in machine learning, he is specifically interested in how transcriptional dysregulation affects human diseases, specifically focusing on pediatric kidney diseases. Dongwon seeks to better understand the underlying genetic mechanisms of these diseases and believes we can make a significant breakthrough with our single-cell multi-omic approaches combined with machine- learning techniques.
Lab Members
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Anya Greenberg, BS | Computational Biologist Anya is a computational biologist studying gene regulation of kidney and immune cells to help decipher the genomic basis of pediatric kidney diseases. As an undergraduate at the University of Rochester, Anya worked in Dr. Amanda Larracuente’s evolutionary genomics lab studying repetitive DNA profiles. She used data visualization and machine learning models to better understand the evolutionary impact of repeat dynamics.
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Jeerthi Kannan | Computational Biologist
Jeerthi is a research assistant with experience in computational biology, genomics, machine learning, and AI. While attending the University of Rochester and Vanderbilt University, she has used feature identification, visualization, and analysis to inform outcomes in biomedical research projects. She seeks to utilize additional computational methods to contribute towards further understanding of pediatric kidney diseases.
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Eric Sakkas | Student Research Assistant Eric Sakkas is a sophomore at Wesleyan University studying Molecular Biology & Biochemistry and Computer Science. At Wesleyan, he is a member of Dr. Michael Weir's lab, where he utilizes molecular dynamics simulations to better understand the CAR mRNA-interaction surface of the ribosome.
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Parsa Seyfourian | Student Intern
Parsa is studying sn-ATAC seq in PBMC cells to potentially identify novel candidate cis-regulatory elements that would shed light on nephrotic syndrome. Parsa graduated from the University of British Columbia with a Bachelor of Science in Honours Biology. His thesis work in Dr. Ben Matthews lab was on using deep learning models to analyze behavioural motifs in mosquito larvae. Also, Parsa also worked in Dr. Marco Marra's lab where he developed a pipeline to assess the performance of gene regulatory network algorithms. |
Alumni
Seong Kyu Han, PhD | Postdoctoral Fellow, currently Assistant Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, Inha University, South Korea
Ana Onuchic-Whitford, MD | Research Fellow, currently Instructor, Harvard School of Medicine and Nephrologist, Brigham and Women's Hospital
Jihoon Yoon, MD, PhD | Research Associate, currently Clinical Fellow, Department of Genomic Medicine, Seoul National University Hospital, South Korea