| Name | Project | From | Next Chapter |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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 |
Meet the lab ~ a team of computational biologists, data scientists, and researchers advancing cancer genomics and precision medicine.
The Research Champions
Dr. Venkata Krishna Chaithanya Manam
Dr. Manam earned his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University, where he focused on NLP methods to detect and resolve ambiguities in crowdsourcing tasks, improving clarity and the quality of results with minimal effort from requesters (including publications in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters and conferences.) He was an AI & NLP Research Scientist at Reveal AI before joining the lab.
He currently works on multi-modal datasets to discover hidden patterns in cancer research.
Fadeela Sheini, OD
Fadeela Sheini is a Vision Science PhD student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), co-mentored with Dr Maria Grant. She aims to connect mechanistic research with real world clinical impact. Her work and training span experimental design and quantitative analysis, to understand how retinal tissues respond to metabolic and ischemic stress.
She is working on lipid metabolism and inflammation in diabetic retinopathy and retinopathy of prematurity, to identify therapeutic 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 multiple publications including one in BMC bioinformatics. Now a MSTP MD/PhD student at UAB. He is interested in immuno-dysregulation and cellular communication breakdowns that lead to disease. His work covers multi-omics integration platforms, cell-cell communication algorithms, single-cell analysis pipelines.
Doug Welsch - Bioinformatician
He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from William Marsh Rice University, a leading research university in the United States. During his college years, he also pursued 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, focusing on image analysis of synthetic lipid vesicles under cryo-EM, and co-authored a publication in Biophysical Reports. He also worked in Dr. Hongjie Li’s Lab at Baylor College of Medicine under the supervision of Dr. Tzu-Chiao Lu on single-cell data analysis and published a co-authored paper in Science.
He published multiple papers including Blood, Cancer Gene Therapy, and more with us.
Brunno Macedo - PhD student
He received a Bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Sciences from the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil, where he gained experience in clinical and laboratory hematology while working as a teacher’s assistant for both undergraduate and professional specialization courses for two years. He recently completed a Master of Sciences degree from the University of São Paulo at Ribeirão Preto Medical School (Internal Medicine Graduate Program). During his Master’s program, he conducted research in Dr. Fabiola Traina’s lab, which focuses on molecular alterations and signaling pathways in myeloid neoplasms. Currently, Brunno is a PhD student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.