I get a lot of e-mail requesting information about the possibility of joining the lab. Before sending me e-mail, please see if your question is answered below. If you send me a question I have already answered here, please do not expect a response.
PhD Admissions
In order for you to pursue graduate studies in my group, you will have to first be admitted to a graduate program at the University of Virginia. I'm currently recruiting students from two different programs: biomedical engineering, and biomedical sciences. I don't control the general admission processes to UVA, so I am unable to help other than to point you to the official PhD programs.
How this works is that students first apply to a program. The process is very competitive, and the admissions committees will be looking in detail at your publication record, particularly if you have published any first-author papers in high quality journals. If accepted, students have the opportunity to do a rotation in my group, after which, if it were mutually acceptable, you could join the group.
If you are an international student, unfortunately, support is even more limited, and so the process is particularly competitive. International students who are successful are often coming in with papers authored in high-impact journals in the field. For example, students joining my lab would likely have already led (first-author) or at least contributed to studies published in the same journals that I publish in. If you do not have prior experience publishing in these journals, your application may not be viewed as competitive by the admissions committee.
Undergraduates
I do not currently have any openings for undergraduates. If I have space for undergraduates, they will show up below under "Open Positions".
Graduate Students at UVA
If you're currently admitted as a PhD student at UVA, I may be open for rotations. Please contact me to discuss your interests.
Open Positions
No open positions at this time.
About the Lab
The Databio group is an interdisciplinary and collaborative computational biology research group located in the Center for Public Health Genomics at UVA. We are also affiliated with the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, Department of Public Health Sciences, the School of Data Science, the Cancer Center, and the Child Health Research Center at UVA.
Our research is at the interface of computation and biology, drawing on techniques in computer science, data science, bioinformatics, and machine learning, and applying them to biological questions in cancer, epigenetics, single-cell analysis, development, and genomics. We collect both novel data and public data and make use of UVA's high-performance cluster for computational approaches to biological questions.
Our biological questions are focused on understanding gene regulation and epigenetics in development and disease, such as cancer, atherosclerosis, and kidney disease. How does DNA encode regulatory networks that enable cellular differentiation? We rely on experimental data from sequencing-based epigenome experiments like ATAC-seq, bisulfite-seq, and ChIP-seq, and we use these data to study fundamental principles of regulatory DNA in human health.
We are building a team of intelligent, creative people who are interested in working together to accomplish great things. We collaborate extensively. We emphasize social coding, using GitHub to share code both within the group and so others can benefit from our work. We seek to write readable, reusable code and apply it to new biological questions. We challenge the norm in academic computational research of individual scientists writing isolated code, and instead push open, multi-author code development. If these topics excite you, please read more about our research interests and recent publications.
About the University
The University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819, is the only collegiate UNESCO World Heritage site in the US. It is located near Shenandoah National Park in the beautiful foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in Charlottesville, Virginia. UVA routinely ranks in the top 3 public universities in the United States, with a co-located School of Medicine and a top-tier environment for research. Charlottesville is also a great place to live.