Our Team

The Team

Andrew Su is a Professor in the Department of Integrative, Structural and Computational Biology at the Scripps Research Institute. Prior to joining Scripps in July 2011, he was the Associate Director of Bioinformatics at the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation (GNF) in San Diego, CA. more...

Chunlei Wu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Integrative, Structural and Computational Biology at the Scripps Research Institute. Formerly a member of the lab, he has become principal investigator of his own lab and remains a close collaborator. more…

Ginger Tsueng joined the lab in May 2014 as the Scientific Outreach Project Manager. She has a strong interest in citizen science, crowdsourcing, and information extraction. She writes blog posts, tweets, etc. for the various projects in the lab while working on the Mark2Cure and the Gene Wiki projects. more…

Laura Hughes is a research scientist that joined in 2017. She brings her brilliant design experience and excrutiatingly detailed knowledge of governmental processes to the projects at the Su Lab. She works on the ReFRAME project and is currently the chief data scientist for the CVISB project. more…

Marco Cano is a research programmer II that joined in 2018. He is a full stack web developer with a love for front-end design. He combines his experience in web and graphic design with his artistic sense to create a completely new user experience across multiple projects in the lab. He works on SmartAPI, BioThings APIs and more…

Roger Tu is a graduate student who joined the Su Lab in February 2019. His research background is a cross of bioinformatics, analytical chemistry, immunology, and material sciences. Roger is currently interested in the Wikidata project as well as other bioinformatics/genetics projects. more…

Sabah Ul-Hasan is an applied bioinformatics Lecturer and Postdoctoral Associate at Scripps Research since September 2019 and works on the Gene Wiki / Wikidata project. Active in social media outreach, Sabah enjoys improving data literacy for scientists and non-scientists alike through data and database accessibility. more…

Janet Joy is a graduate student who rotated in the lab in early 2020 and then officially joined later on. Her background is in physics but her interests lie in understanding biological systems. more…

Julia Mullen is a research programmer with a focus in web technology that joined in 2020. She believes that accessible technology is well documented and easy to use. She likes to solve problems through learning, teaching, and programming. more…

Ricardo Avila is a research programmer who joined the Wu and Su labs in the summer of 2020. Prior to that, he completed three internships at GlaxoSmithKline working with protein informatics and data visualization. His interests include big data analysis, structural biology, and open source collaborative science. <“http://sulab.org/author/ravila/”>more…

Eric Hu is a post-doctoral research associate who joined the lab in the summer of 2020. He is interested in working in research which can integrate computer science together with other science and engineering fields, specifically fields related to biology and neuroscience. His expertise lies in scientific computing, machine learning, and optimization, but he is always looking forward to learning more…

Colleen is a research programmer who joined the Wu and Su labs in the summer of 2020 with interests include data science, biochemistry, immunology, and bioinformatics infrastructure (KGs / data integration, interoperability, and storage / ontologies / reasoning). On off-hours, Colleen tutors, knits, and does yoga. more…

Yao Yao is a staff scientist who joined the Wu and Su labs in the fall of 2020 with interests in bioinformatics and machine learning. He completed his PhD in Computer Science at Oregon State University.  more…

Emily Haag is a community engagement specialist who joined the Wu and Su labs in the fall of 2020. She has a unique background working as part of a behavioral data science team for a mobile health startup, and valuable experience in content creation and usability testing/design. more…

Carolina Gonzalez-Cavazos is a first year graduate student rotating in the lab. She is interested in addressing biological and biomedical questions by using bioinformatics tools. She joined the lab in February of 2021. more…

Sander Su is an Administrative Collaborator who has more than seven years’ experience in health informatics, particularly as it relates to projects advancing scientific knowledge of (1) precision medicine approaches (Elasticsearch and NLP) for COVID-19 & cancer treatment and preventive care more…

Jackson is a research programmer who joined the Wu and Su labs in the summer of 2021 with interests in data science and data infrastructure and experience as a back-end developer. more…

Nichollette is a research programmer who joined the Wu and Su labs in the summer of 2021 who enjoys machine learning, bioinformatics and buildiing software tools. Prior to this, Nichollette coded, primarily with fMRI brain data, for a Neuropsychology Ingestive Behavior lab. more…

Jason Lin is a research programmer who joined in the winter of 2021. Jason graduated with a B.S. Cognitive Science w/ Machine Learning and Minor in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego. Jason has a background in data science and an interest in backend web development.. more…

Meghamala Sinha is a staff scientist who joined in the winter of 2021 and specializes in Machine Learning, Computational Biology and Data Science. Meghamala’s dissertation research centered around using fundamentals of Causality to differentiate true cause-effect relationships from mere associations in data and building a more robust and reliable inference model. more…

Candice Czech is a research programmer who joined in the winter of 2021. She is a full-stack developer with a background in graphic design based in Montreal. Her interests include developing intuitive user interfaces and interactive data visualizations. Her out-of-office interests include tinkering with electronics, cooking (and eating) and board games. more…

Karina Zaiets is a front-end developer who joined in the winter of 2021. Karina has a background in journalism from Kyiv National University of Culture and Arts. Karina received a M.A. in science journalism at University of Missouri on a Fulbright scholarship and has interned for a year and a half at USA TODAY for the interactive graphics team. more…

Come back soon for more complete profiles (and possibly better pictures) of group members! In the mean time, apply to join our group!

Alumni

Contact Andrew to add or update your info…

Zhongchao Qian is a research programmer who joined in 2020 and left in January 2022. He has an M.S. in Imaging Science from Rochester Institute of Technology and studied deep learning prior to joining the as a research programmer. more…

Xinghua (Jerry) Zhou is a research programmer II that joined in 2018 and left in 2021. He graduated from the University of California, San Diego with a B.S. in Computer Engineering. He worked on the BioThings APIs. In his spare time, he applies his programming skills towards developing ways to be more efficient with his time. more…

Kaleigh Jaeger is an intern who joined the lab for the Spring/Summer of 2021. She is a currently a full-stack Java software developer located in Dallas, TX and is interested in combining her background in biology with her current work in software development to work one day for a lab studying behavioral health. more…

Rachel Sattler is a graduate student who rotated in the lab for the summer of 2021. Rachel is a recent graduate from the University of Texas at Austin, where she worked in a molecular biology lab to analyze tRNA fragment expression in HEK293 cells and differential gene expression in COVID-19 vs healthy patient plasma. more…

Saido Noor is an intern who joined the lab for the summer of 2021. Saiido likes to hammock, hang out with some friends,reading an is currently, majoring in Biology with a double minor in Data Science and Political Science at Macalester College. more…

Jordan Beach is an intern who joined the lab for the summer of 2021. Jordan will be starting as an undergraduate majoring in biochemistry at UC Santa Barbara in the fall. Jordan is interested in analytics and biology in the hopes to work on cancer research in the future. more…

Nipun Das is an intern who joined the lab for the summer of 2021 and is a rising senior at Westview High School. Nipun has a lot of interest in the applications of computer science in areas such as bioinformatics and robotics. more…

Stephanie Hernandez was our administrative coordinator. She is a native San Diegan with a brief stint in the Bay Area. She assumed administrative responsibilities for the lab in April of 2021 and left at the end of August of 2021. more…
Karthik Gangavarapu is a graduate student who has multiple start dates with the lab. After two successful summers working with us through the Google Summer of Code, and joining the lab as an undergrad assistant in January 2014, he graduated, left, and returned to us in August of 2015. He finished his PhD in 2021 more…

Kevin Xin was once a graduate student who joined the lab in 2015. He finished his graduate studies in 2019 working on the MyVariant.info project and was hired as a staff scientist immediately thereafter. He worked on the BioThings APIs and NCATs translator project and left in 2021. more…

Mike Mayers is a graduate student that joined in 2016. He gradated in the summer of 2020 and has continued as a staff scientist. He is currently interested in working on solutions to some of the problems of Big Data as it relates to bioinformatics. He does a lot of data cleaning, munging, and mapping in order to develop algorithms for identifying drug repurposing candidates. He left in 2021more…

Nicole Mugford was our administrative coordinator. She is a professional administrative coordinator who has provided administrative support to the County of San Diego’s COVID-19 efforts, the Salk Institute, the Broad Institute and more. She assumed administrative responsibilities for the lab from March until April of 2021. more…

Andrea Hom was our administrative assistant extraordinaire. She is a problem-solver and team-player that joined the lab in July of 2018. Since joining,she has already found ways to streamline various administrative processes in the lab and trained the team on newly-implemented, site-wide protocols. She left in March of 2021 more…

Amitesh Kumar Sharma is an intern who joined the lab in the Spring of 2021 and left at the start of Summer 2021. He is currently a junior at University of California, San Diego pursuing a BS degree in Mathematics- Computer Science. His interests are frontend, backend, and full stack development and hopes to learn more about machine learning and AI in the future. more…

Paul Gaudin was a research programmer who joined the lab in the summer of 2020 and left in January 2021. He is currently a Data Scientist at Beyond Meat.  He grew up in a small town outside of Portland, Oregon, named Happy Valley. Growing up in Oregon, Paul grew to enjoy running, swimming, and the great outdoors. Having long been interested in medical sciences, more…

Lulu Ricketts is a summer intern who joined in 2020. She will be going into her third year of undergrad at UCSD as a Cognitive Science/ML major and Computer Science minor. She is interested in sustainability and wants to find new ways to improve the efficiency of the scientific community through technology, specifically machine learning and data analytics. more…

Jake Bruggemann is a graduate student that officially joined the Su Lab in 2015 and finished his studies in the summer of 2020. Presently, he works at Illumina as a Senior Bioinformatics Engineer, His background is in computation and mathematics, but his interests have since expanded to the realms of biology, bioinformatics, and statistics. He is working on crowdsourcing classifications in electron micrographs. more…

William Kang is a high school intern who joined the lab for the summer of 2020. He is a rising junior at Canyon Crest Academy and is interested in disease detection and drug development. more…

Andrew Gao is a high school intern who joined the lab for the summer of 2020. He is interested in bioinformatics and cancer diagnostics and founded The Helyx Initiative, which is a youth organization that aims to teach students about biology and coding concepts. In his spare time, he likes to read about history and play tennis. more…

Meriam Esif is a recent high school graduate and a rising college freshman at San Diego State University who joined the lab as an intern for the summer of 2020. She has always been interested in research and how data is analyzed. She is learning many new things about the different methods and software tools used to understand biological data. more…

Eric Zhou is a high school intern who joined the lab for the summer of 2020. He is a rising senior at La Jolla High School whose interests include web development, machine learning, and eating. He is currently working on Biothings Explorer GraphQL. more…

Toby Li was a graduate student that joined in 2015 and graduated in 2020. He has worked on a variety of projects ranging from crowd-sourcing entity relationship extractions, to predicting candidates for drug re-purposing. He munged, mopped up, and mined massive, messy data for meaningful information. more…

Sebastien Lelong is a research programmer that joined in 2016 and left in the Spring of 2020. more…

Kai-yu Chen is a graduate student who rotated into the Wu/Su labs in 2019. She received her master degree from UCLA in Bioengineering. She is interested in applying her data science skills towards biomedical applications and has been working on the BioThings projects as part of her rotation in the Wu Lab.more…

Núria Queralt Rosinach is a postdoctoral associate that joined in 2016. She worked on biomedical discovery specifically on rare genetic diseases and left the lab in October of 2019. She has taken another position as a researcher in the Humans Genetics Department at the Leiden University Medical Center. more…

Cyrus Afrasiabi is a research programmer that joined in 2015. He is an experienced bioinformatics application developer who has worked with a wide variety of biological data ranging from genomics to imaging and sound data. He now works as a Senior Software Engineer at NIH-NIAID. more…

Louis Gioia was a graduate student working in cancer genomics. He joined the lab in January 2014, and left in 2019. more…

Byung Ryul Jeon is a visiting scientist that joined in 2017 and left in 2019. He is an accomplished doctor and scholar interested in broadening his knowledge and honing his research skills

Shang-Fu (Shaun) Chen is a graduate student that rotated into the lab in 2018. He graduated from National Taiwan University

Nina Moore is a graduate student that rotated into the Wu lab in 2018. She graduated from DePauw University

Greg Stupp is a research scientist that joined the lab in September 2014 and left at the end of 2018. He organized the first BD2K Hackathon. Currently, he is a Scientific Director for General Research Laboratories.

Derek Jow is a research intern for the summer of 2018. He is a computer science student at the University of California, San Diego

Michelle Fox is a summer intern selected by the Life Sciences Summer Institute. She is a high school student who joined in the summer of 2018.

Fatima Perez is a summer intern selected by the Life Sciences Summer Institute. She is a high school student who joined in the summer of 2018.

Sebastian Burgstaller was a postdoctoral associate that joined in 2015 and left in December of 2017. He accepted a postdoctoral associate position at the Max F. Perutz Laboratories in Vienna, Austria.

Max Nanis was a research programmer working on our Gene Wiki effort, Mark2Cure, and other projects. He joined the lab in June 2012 and physically left in October of 2017. He is still with us remotely.

Tim Putman is a postdoctoral associate that joined in 2015 and left in July 2017. He is now a Research Assistant Professor and Bioinformatics Software Developer at Oregon Health and Science University

Ben Good was an Assistant Professor of Molecular Medicine in the Department of Molecular and Experimental Medicine at the Scripps Research Institute. He joined the lab in July 2011, and left in July 2017.

Ramya Gamini was a postdoctoral associate that joined the lab in October 2014. As of October 2019, she is now a Prinicpal Scientist of Computational Biology with Pfizer.

Julee Adesara was a Master’s student that joined in 2015. She worked on biothings.drugs project, and graduated in April 2017. She is presently a Senior Statistical Programmer for Covance.

Sandip Chatterjee is a postdoctoral associate that joined in 2015. He was interested in applying natural language processing methods to try to make sense of the rapidly expanding biomedical literature, and left in July of 2016. He is now a Bioinformatics Data Specialist at Ancestry.com.

Jennifer Fouquier was a bioinformatics programmer that joined in 2015. She contributed to the Mark2Cure efforts, and left in June of 2016. She is now a Predoctorial Candidate at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.

Erick R. Scott was a KL2 scholar and graduate student, who was a member of Peter G. Schultz’s lab and joined the Su lab in August 2014. He completed his studies in 2015, and is a Director of Clinical Data Science at Karius.

Salvatore Loguercio was a postdoctoral associate working on several projects related to the Gene Wiki and biological games. He joined the lab in January 2012, and left in June of 2015. Sal is now a staff scientist in the Balch lab here at TSRI.

Adam Mark was a graduate student interested in translational genomics and developing prescriptive tools. He joined the lab in January 2014, and left in May of 2015. Adam now works at Avera Health as a Clinical Bioinformatics Analyst.

Vyshakh Babji was a summer intern. He joined the lab in May 2014 to work on The Cure project, and left in April 2015. He is now a software engineer at RingCentral.

Tobias Meissner was a postdoctoral associate whose research focuses on using quantitative methods for biomedical discovery. He joined the lab in June 2013, and left in October 2014. He is now a Cancer Genomics Investigator at Avera Health.

Katie Fisch was a postdoctoral associate whose research focuses on using quantitative methods for biomedical discovery. She joined the lab in January 2013, left in September 2014, and is currently the Executive Director of UCSD’s Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics.

Ian MacLeod was a Research Programmer on our BioGPS team. Prior to joining Scripps in July 2011 as an inaugural member of the lab, he was a Bioinformatics Programmer at the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation (GNF) in San Diego, CA, and he left for greener pastures in December 2012. He is currently a Senior Software Developer at Covario.

Erik Clarke was a research programmer working on our Gene Wiki effort. He was an inaugural member of the lab when we started here in July 2011, and he left for the University of Pennsylvania in August 2012 where he is currently a graduate student.

Shirley Willis was our administrative assistant. She joined the lab in July 2011 and retired in 2018

Marc Leglise (Software engineer) – Private software consultant
Yue Hue (Postdoctoral Associate) – Research Fellow, NCI
Jennifer Flyod (Postdoctoral Associate) – Technology & Patent Specialist, La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology
David Delano (Postdoctoral Associate) – Senior Product Manager, Illumina
Stephen Su (Postdoctoral Associate) – Senior Scientist, Merrimack Pharmaceuticals
Jon Huss (Master’s student) – Principal Software Engineer
Banu Dost (Intern) – Software Engineer, Google