The Team
Tarjinder (TJ) Singh, Ph.D.
I am an Assistant Professor of Computational and Statistical Genomics at Columbia University’s Department of Psychiatry and the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI) and an associate faculty member at the New York Genome Center (NYGC). I also have an interdisciplinary appointment at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute.
I received my Bachelor’s Degree in Biology, Mathematics, and Economics at Williams College in 2012. I completed my graduate studies at the University of Cambridge and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute with Dr. Jeffrey Barrett in 2016. I continued his training at the Analytical and Translational Unit of the Massachusetts General Hospital and the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T. with Dr. Mark Daly and Dr. Benjamin Neale as a post-doctoral fellow (2017 - 2020) and an Instructor at Harvard Medical School (2020 - 2022).
As part of global collaborative efforts, I have analyzed large-scale sequence data to identify protein-coding variants in individual genes that confer substantial risk for psychiatric disorders. I am interested in using genome sequencing as a foundational tool to understand the etiology of mental illnesses.
Priya is a computational neurobiologist who earned her PhD from the Graduate School of Systemic Neurosciences (GSN-LMU), Germany, where she was also part of the EpiSyStem Marie Skłodowska-Curie Network at Helmholtz Munich. Her research focused on decoding astrocytic identity shifts post-injury and direct neuronal reprogramming. She specializes in cross-species comparisons and multi-omics data analysis, and is excited to explore the molecular basis of neuropsychiatric disorders using integrative approaches, including long-read sequencing, at NYGC.
Sophie completed her undergraduate education at Carleton College in Minnesota, where she majored in math/statistics. She then went on to pursue a PhD in biostatistics at Boston University. Her thesis work focused on the development and evaluation of polygenic scores in multi-ancestry applications. She is excited to continue working on method development to study complex diseases in diverse and underrepresented populations at NYGC.
Minji is an MD-PhD from the South Korea and a awardee of the Paul Janssen Translational Fellowship at Columbia University. She is co-mentored on the clinical side with Dr. John Mann. Her major interest lies on biological underpinnings of psychiatric disorders, especially mood disorders and suicide.
Anne received her Bachelor’s Degree in Chemical Engineering, her Master’s Degree in Biotechnology Engineering and her PhD in Health Sciences from Aarhus University in Denmark. She has been awarded a Lundbeckfonden Fellowship. Anne is co-mentored by Dr. Neville Sanjana (NYGC and NYU). She is interested in using functional genomics to investigate neuropsychiatric diseases, especially Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder.
Fion is a second-year PhD student in the Systems Biology track of the Integrated CMBS program at Columbia University. Prior to Columbia, she received my bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins University where she majored in Neuroscience and Molecular & Cellular Biology. After graduation, she worked as a lab technician and studied retinal development genetics via single-cell RNA sequencing analysis. She is now interested in using statistical analyses and machine learning to functionally dissect the molecular pathways psychiatric diseases converge on to precipitate diverse but overlapping phenotypes.
Giorgia is a second year PhD Student in the Genetics and Development program at Columbia University. She graduated from Rutgers University with a degree in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry and worked on chromatin epigenetics in olfactory sensory neurons. She is excited to work in the realm of human genetics during her PhD and help elucidate the complexity underlying genetic variation and how that can help us better understand and diagnose disease.
Carina is a second-year PhD student in the Neurobiology and Behavior program at Columbia University. After gaining foundational experience working on systems-related neuroscience projects at the University of Washington and Rutgers University, she is excited to focus on the molecular and genetic methods underlying psychiatric disorders.
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Pedro has a M.S. in Computer Science and a B.A. in Computer Science-Mathematics and Philosophy from Columbia University. He is eager to use machine learning and statistics to discover associations between psychiatric disorders and genes. He is also interested in the reference class problem in philosophy of probability and in software development.
Dong is a post-baccalaureate research associate at the Singh Lab. He graduated from Colgate University in May 2023 with a B.A. majoring in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics. During his undergrad, he worked on projects involving the human gut microbiome and its association with the brain under supervision of Professor Ahmet Ay. He is excited to further explore human genomics data in relation to mental illnesses.
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Kelly is a computational research associate in the Singh lab. She earned her BA in biology with a specialization in neurobiology from Boston University in January 2021. Kelly worked as a wet lab technician for two years before moving to New York, where she began work at Columbia Medical Center analyzing single cell and spatial transcriptomics data to probe the etiology of glioblastoma and neurodegenerative diseases. She is now interested in applying her computational skills to explore human genomics data and psychiatric diseases.
Alumni
Faris is currently a third-year Medical Student at the Icahn School of Medicine. He received my BA in Chemistry and Statistics from Williams College summa cum laude. He was an undergraduate research student working with TJ at the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T. between 2020 to 2022 where he investigated the pleiotropy of rare variants in the broader population. He continued on as a research associate at Columbia University where he contributed to a project on imaging genetics and polygenic risk score associations in biobank data. He currently also work at AIMS, a consortium of AI researchers at Mount Sinai Hospital, where he work on machine learning methods development for clinical tasks.
Shaked is a post-baccalaureate computational research associate at the Singh Lab. She graduated from Harvard University in May 2023 with a B.A. in Neuroscience, Mind Brain Behavior track. During my undergrad, she researched the effects of mindfulness training on brain mechanisms of fear extinction learning, as a possible intervention for trauma-related disorders. She is excited to explore human genomics in relation to mental illness to help develop effective therapeutic interventions.
Shirley is a first year PhD student in the Neurobiology and Behavior program at Columbia University. She graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a B.A. in Biology: Neuroscience and Psychology in 2021, where she studied both molecular mechanisms underlying neurodegenerative diseases and risk factors for early-adolescent depression onset using neuroimaging data. She spent another two years developing and validating CSF and plasma biomarkers for early Alzheimer’s Disease diagnosis. She is now interested in elucidating mechanisms underlying neuropsychiatric diseases, especially schizophrenia and bipolar disorders.
Vanessa is a first year PhD student in the Neurobiology and Behavior program at Columbia University. After receiving my M.S. in neuroscience from University College London and B.A. in psychology from UC Berkeley, she is eager to continue working on the neurobiological and genetic etiology of neuropsychiatric diseases, especially major depressive disorder and anxiety.
Claire is a first year PhD student in the CMBS program at Columbia. After graduating with a degree in Physics and Mathematics from Columbia in 2017, Claire began a transition to neuroscience working as a technician in the Department of Pathology & Cell Biology at CUMC. She is interested in studying the mechanisms underlying neuropsychiatric disease, particularly bipolar disorder, and translating findings from functional & genetics studies into animal models.
I am currently a graduate student majoring in Data Science at Carnegie Mellon University. I graduated from Emory University with a B.S. in Quantitative Science and Economics. As a future data scientist, I am eager to apply machine learning techniques to uncover the relationship between genetics and human diseases by contributing to TJ’s exciting research.
I'm currently a graduate student of the Master of Computer Science Program at Columbia University and was a student at Emory University for undergraduate study. I am excited to work on the data-relevant job to extract hidden insights, especially machine learning application in phenotype analysis and genomics area. Also, I'm interested in software development as well.
Zhiyan is a first-year graduate student in Neuroscience and Education program at Columbia. She studied psychology at NYU as an undergraduate. She is performing exploratory data analysis on the postmortem brain database of the MIND division.
I am currently a junior at Brown University, pursuing computational biology as my field of study. My research interests revolve around the application of computational methods, specifically machine learning and simulation techniques, to biological phenomena. This summer, I have the opportunity to work with MRI scans of the human brain. During this period, my primary objective is to develop and implement data reduction methods for analyzing questionnaire and electronic health record data. By identifying latent features through this process, I aim to establish connections between the brain scan data and questionnaire responses, ultimately quantifying their impact on human behavior and health.
Born and raised in San Mateo, California, Wilson is a proud graduate of The Nueva School. His passion for computational biology led him to the University of Pennsylvania where he is currently pursuing a concentration in computational biology and is expected to graduate in June 2026. His passion grew while working for UCSF Biomedical Research, utilizing AI to enhance CT imaging. He grew to become particularly interested in the intersections of AI and biology, working on various different algorithms to diagnose tumors. Wilson's interests outside of biotechnology include Chinese yoyo, playing guitar, tennis, and weightlifting. Wilson is excited to apply his skills and interests to support the research at Singh Lab.
I am a senior at Williams College (class of 2023), and I am majoring in Biology and German. I had the pleasure to work with TJ in the summer of 2020 after my freshman year, where he supervised me doing computational research on the GTEx dataset of gene expression in variable tissues. I kept on doing computational biology research at Williams throughout my second year until I got an opportunity to work in Sabatini's lab in Whitehead Institute studying protein interactions during the summer of 2021. This year, I plan to do my thesis in the biochemistry lab at Williams, where I want to investigate ASAP1 protein's role in ovarian cancer, and I hope to continue on doing cancer-related research after finishing my undergraduate degree.
I’m currently a senior at Williams College majoring in Biology with dual concentrations in Neuroscience and Molecular Biology. I worked under TJ during the summer of 2021 as a recipient of the Williams-Whitehead Scholarship, where I completed a project in Python and R, analyzing proteomic data to investigate phenotypic enrichment in a murine model of Alzheimer’s disease. Currently, I’m working on a thesis project in the Lebestky Laboratory, where I am using transcriptomics to better understand the role of the toll receptor in pathogen sensing in the D. melanogaster nervous system. After Williams, I intend to pursue computational neurobiology research at the graduate level.