People

Joe migrated across a few disciplines, starting with an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering, a PhD involving cell biology, microscopy, and neuronal development, and several postdocs in molecular biology and computational biology labs, before joining the Bioinformatics Core in 2007. Joe enjoys wrestling with genome assembly and frustrating his colleagues with 1,000-character unix “one-liners.”

Monica is the resident biologist in the Core (living proof that a bench scientist can learn to use command line), with a PhD in Genetics. She enjoys discussing experiments with researchers, analyzing data, and organizing workshops.

Jessie was trained as a theoretical chemist, before moving to UC Davis working in the field of computational biology as a postdoc. In 2012, Jessie started working at the Bioinformatics Core as a data analyst. In 2015, Jessie spent one year working in the Genome Institute of Singapore, before rejoining the Core in early 2016. Jessie is fascinated by biology, enjoys good thriller stories, and likes to take on challenges.

Nikhil is a bioinformatics programming, database delving, salsa dancing, scrabble playing genius. He has a Master’s degree in Computer Science and a PhD in sheer chutzpah.

Blythe received her doctorate in Statistics from UC Davis in 2003, with a dissertation focused on data transformations for gene-expression microarray data. Following a post doc at UC Berkeley, she spent four years at Genentech before returning to Davis in 2009. When not working with the Bioinformatics Core, she analyzes all manner of clinical and molecular data for clients at the UC Davis Medical Center. In her spare time, she plays cello with the Medical Center String Quartet.

Richard is the Linux/UNIX Sysadmin for the core. His esoteric specialties include wrangling and debugging scientific code and building high performance computing and storage.

A fan of open source technologies, Adam enjoys the challenge of building web applications that help researchers organize and share their data. After a 3 year hiatus in Paris, France, Adam was drawn back by the allure of working with the cutting edge technologies and brilliant people of the Bioinformatics Core. When not engrossed in code, Adam can be found keeping off those programming pounds by participating in copious amounts of sporting activities.

Keith has been working in the bioinformatics field since 1993 and can thus talk comfortably about Gopher servers and other relics from the pre-world-wide-web past. He has experience in a variety of areas, particularly those relating to the structure and evolution of genes & genomes. Most importantly, he is innately distrustful and suspicious of nearly all bioinformatics data.