Interim Bioinformatics Core Manager
Jie (Jessie) Li (jjsli@ucdavis.edu)
UC Davis Genome Center
1315 Genome and Biomedical Sciences Facility
(530) 754-5396
Data Analysis Team
Blythe Durbin-Johnson, Principal Statistician
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.
Bradley Jenner
Bradley is a recent graduate of UC Davis, receiving his B.S in Biotechnology. Despite spending most of his undergrad working in a plant pathology lab, he has a knack for software development and data analysis, which are his main responsibilities in the Core. Outside of the office, he spends most of his free time playing guitar and tinkering with computers.
Nikhil Joshi, Bioinformatics Programmer/Analyst (najoshi@ucdavis.edu)
Nik 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. He started out in the Core doing more computer science and has transitioned, over the years, into bioinformatics. Consequently, he has knowledge about everything in the Core.
Jie (Jessie) Li, Bioinformatics Analyst (jjsli@ucdavis.edu)
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. Jessie is fascinated by biology, enjoys good thriller stories, and likes to take on challenges.
Hannah Lyman (hslyman@ucdavis.edu)
Hannah joined the Bioinformatics Core in 2020 after finishing her PhD in Integrative Genetics and Genomics at UC Davis in 2019. She enjoys digging around in genomic data, learning new ways to do things in R, and knitting impractical scarves.
High Performance Computing Team
Adam Schaal, Database/Web Programmer (amschaal@ucdavis.edu)
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.
Alumni
Joseph Fass
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.”
Keith Bradnam
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.
Sam Hunter
Dr. Sam Hunter works at the intersection of Biology, Computer Science, and Statistics, with degrees in all three fields. His research interests can be summarized as involving any question that can be studied with high throughput sequencing and genomics technologies.
Monica Britton, Sr. Bioinformatics Analyst (mtbritton@ucdavis.edu)
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.
Keith Mitchell
Keith is a graduate student with the Core, recently graduating from UCLA with a B.S. in microbio, immuno, and molecular genetics along with a minor in bioinformatics. He enjoys teaching, data analysis with python, building content management systems, and all things bioinformatics. In his small amount of free time as a grad student, you might catch him playing basketball at the gym or skiing in Tahoe.
Matt Settles
Matt is a former director of the Core. He is interested in generation, computational manipulation and interpretation of very large data sets across a wide range of biological questions, often applying techniques not originally designed for a particular data type or experiment in order to ask, and answer, new and interesting biological questions.