Mingzhou (Ming) is a human geneticist specializing in complex disorders. She earned her Ph.D. from the Vilcek Institute of Graduate Biomedical Sciences at the New York University School of Medicine, and was affiliated with the Center for Human Genetics and Genomics at NYU Langone Health. Her research has focused on the genetic underpinnings of complex traits, particularly neuropsychiatric and neurodevelopment disorders. At NYGC, Ming is passionate about leveraging cutting-edge machine learning techniques to explore the intersection of genetics, environment, and social determinants of health in shaping these traits.
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.
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.
Chunni (Zoe) is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University. She earned her B.S. in Psychology and Biology from UNC-Chapel Hill and her M.S. in Biostatistics from Northwestern University. Previously, she worked as a statistician in the Braun Lab at Northwestern, where she studied circadian rhythm using transcriptomic and wearable device data. She later joined Massachusetts General Hospital as a statistician and clinical research coordinator, collecting and analyzing MRI, proteomic, and clinical data from patients with eating disorders. Her research interests focus on integrating omics and brain data to advance precision health in psychiatry, with the goal of identifying early risk factors, biomarkers, and effective treatments for patients.
Fion is a fourth-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.
Carina is a third-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.
