People

Current:

Yuval Itan (Principal Investigator)
Affiliations: The Charles Bronfman Institute of Personalized Medicine and Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA.
Academic background: human genomics, computational biology, bioinformatics.
Scientific goals: understanding the genomics underlying human disease. Automating the identification of disease-causing mutations and genes in human genomes.
Personal interests: mixed martial arts, traveling, science fiction.
Email: yuval.itan@mssm.edu

Meltem Ece Kars (Postdoctoral Fellow)
Affiliations: The Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA.
Academic background: human genomics, population genetics, ophthalmology
Scientific goals: to identify molecular mechanisms in human genetic disease using bioinformatic approaches
Personal interests: history, painting, cooking and baking.
Email: meltemece.kars@mssm.edu

David Stein (Ph.D. Student, co-mentored with Avner Schlessinger)
Affiliations: Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA.
Academic background: Computer Science and Biology
Scientific goals: developing methods to further interrogate and understand the functional implications of genetic mutations
Personal interests: science fiction, chess, climbing.
Email: david.stein@icahn.mssm.edu

Yiming Wu (Senior Scientist)
Affiliations: The Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA.
Academic background: analytical chemistry.
Scientific goals: integrating machine learning, proteomics and genome data to analyze variants/individuals from gnome wide association analysis and case/controls studies.
Personal interests: soccer, watching movies, cooking, reading.
Email: yiming.wu@mssm.edu

Peng Zhang (Postdoctoral Fellow, with Jean-Laurent Casanova)
Affiliations: The Rockefeller University, New York, NY, USA.
Academic background: computational biology
Scientific goals: developing tools and methods that integrates omics data (genetics, genomics, proteomics, therapeutics, interactome, and disasome) with computational approaches to advance the fields for disease-causing gene/mutation prioritization, deleterious variant prediction, and more.
Personal interests: soccer, traveling, photography.
Email: pzhang@mail.rockefeller.edu

Minju Kim (MSc Student)
Affiliations: Biomedical Data Science, Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA.
Academic background: evolutionary genomics, bioinformatics, and infectious disease.
Scientific goals: Understanding genetic/genomic background of phenotypes and behaviors; Understanding human evolution based upon genomic data
Personal interests: Soccer, Taekwondo, Museums, Space
Email: minju.kim@icahn.mssm.edu

Eyyüb Selim Ünlü (Research Assistant Intern)
Affiliations: Istanbul University Faculty of Medicine, Istanbul, Turkey.
Academic background: viral informatics, clinical medicine.
Scientific goals: to discover novel genes associated with phenotypes by applying genomic approaches to multi-trait cohorts
Personal interests: cinematography, video games, soccer
Email: eselimnl@gmail.com

Alumni:

Benjamin Panamdanam (High School Student Intern)
Email: ben.panamdanam@gmail.com

Samantha Schade (Research Assistant Intern)
Email: schadesa@bc.edu

Emma Liu (High School Student Intern)
Email: s024161@students.lmsd.org

Marisa Vomvos (MSc student)
Email: marisa.vomvos@icahn.mssm.edu

Stephen Pupkin (MS in Genetic Counseling student)
Email: stephen.pupkin@icahn.mssm.edu

Cigdem Sevim Bayrak (Postdoctoral Fellow)
Email: cigdem.sevimbayrak@mssm.edu

Margaret Linan (Computational Research Scientist)
Email: margaret.linan@mssm.edu
Quoc Nguyen (Bioinformatics Intern)
Email: quoc.nguyen2@mssm.edu
Kelsie Bogyo (MSc student)
Email: kelsie.bogyo@icahn.mssm.edu
Aayushee Jain (Bioinformatician)
Email: aayusheejain90@gmail.com
Denisa Duma (Postdoctoral Fellow)
Email: denisa.duma@mssm.edu
Lora Liharska (PhD rotation student)
Email: lora.liharska@icahn.mssm.edu