Welcome

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Computational Biology at Carnegie Mellon University. Previously, I was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer and Mathematical Sciences at the University of Toronto Scarborough and the Tri-Campus Department of Mathematics at the University of Toronto.

I am generally interested in developing novel algorithms for bioinformatics applications and translating existing tools from the CS literature to biology. More specifically, my primary research themes are on average-case analysis of string algorithms, probabilistic sketches, and compressive algorithms for data science, with a predominant focus on computational biology and bioinformatics.

On the more theoretical side, I have built more efficient (in either time or space) compressed data structures to answer Boolean or nearest neighbor queries on large datasets. I also care about finding interesting problems to apply these data structures to: for example, by using probabilistic sketches, hospital networks can answer questions of the form "how many patients across the network have either diabetes or hypertension" while preserving patient privacy but also deduplicating patients at multiple hospitals. Alternately, I also build faster analysis algorithms for analysis of (meta)genomic data through a combination of compressed fingerprints and machine learning classifiers, which has applications in understanding human microbiomes.

The most up-to-date list of my publications can always be found on my Google Scholar profile.

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My hobbies include gymnastics and dance, as I love exploring movement of the human body. In a past life, I also read science fiction and fantasy extensively.

My Erdös number is 3.