| Name | Project | From | Current Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zihao Zhang | Machine learning, 2025 Fall | Chinese Academy of Sciences | Nutrition | UAB |
| Yassin Mreyoud | Single-cell genomics, 2025 Summer | WashU | Medicine | UAB | Medicine |
| Doug Welsch | Bioinformatics, 2024-25 | Rice | Computer Science | Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation | Donczew Lab |
| Brunno Macedo | CML genomics, 2024 Fall | UFPE, Brazil | UAB | Matlawska Lab |
The lab develops computational methods to understand cancer, single-cell biology, and the genetics of complex traits, and to turn that understanding into therapy.
Current Members
Dr. Venkata Krishna Chaithanya Manam - Postdoctoral Fellow
Dr. Manam earned his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University. His doctoral work used natural language processing to detect and resolve ambiguities in crowdsourcing task instructions, with publications in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters and at the HCOMP and WWW conferences. He was an AI and NLP Research Scientist at Reveal AI before joining the lab. He works on machine-learning methods for single-cell perturbation data.
Fadeela Sheini - Vision Science PhD Student
Fadeela Sheini, OD, is a Vision Science PhD student at UAB, co-mentored with Dr. Maria Grant. Her work covers experimental design and quantitative analysis of retinal tissue responses to metabolic and ischemic stress. She studies lipid metabolism and inflammation in diabetic retinopathy and retinopathy of prematurity, to identify strategies that preserve vascular stability and protect retinal function.
Alumni
Yassin Mreyoud - MD/PhD Candidate
He was a bioinformatics scientist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, with several publications including one in BMC Bioinformatics. He is now an MSTP MD/PhD student at UAB. His work covers immune dysregulation and cell-cell communication in disease, spanning multi-omics integration, communication-inference algorithms, and single-cell analysis pipelines.
Doug Welsch - Bioinformatician
He earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Rice University, with a minor in Biochemistry and Cell Biology. As a student researcher at Rice, he worked in Dr. M. Neal Waxham’s lab at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston on cryo-EM image analysis of synthetic lipid vesicles, and co-authored a paper in Biophysical Reports. He then worked in Dr. Hongjie Li’s lab at Baylor College of Medicine, with Dr. Tzu-Chiao Lu, on single-cell data analysis, and co-authored a paper in Science.
With the lab, he co-authored papers in Blood and Cancer Gene Therapy, among others.
Brunno Macedo - PhD Student
He earned a Bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Sciences from the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil, where he worked in clinical and laboratory hematology and served two years as a teaching assistant for undergraduate and specialization courses. He then completed a Master of Science at the University of São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto Medical School, in the Internal Medicine Graduate Program. For his Master’s he worked in Dr. Fabiola Traina’s lab on molecular alterations and signaling pathways in myeloid neoplasms. He is now a PhD student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.