Bereketab is a Research Specialist in the Vahedi Lab. He graduated from Swarthmore College in 2023 with a BA in Biology. As an undergraduate, he worked in the Carone lab and studied the satellite sequence HSATII and the functional consequences of its aberrant expression in multiple human cancers. He plans to pursue graduate studies in Genetics or Cell Biology. He enjoys cooking, walking, and playing guitar in his free time.

Atishay is a student in the Bioengineering Graduate Group. Atishay received a BASc in Biomedical Engineering with a specialization in cellular bioengineering from the University of British Columbia in 2022. During his undergraduate co-op terms, he developed custom, high-throughput automation platforms for biomolecular imaging protocols including Fluorescent in-situ Hybridization and Fluorescent in-situ Sequencing on pluripotent stem cell samples. His graduate research in the Vahedi Lab will focus on inferring the epigenetic regulation of gene expression from primary DNA structure using in-situ sequencing/hybridization and machine learning approaches to identify the emergence of immune cells under diseased states in the body.

Yuqi is a graduate student in the Bioengineering Graduate Group. She received her B.S. in Bioinformatics from the University of California, San Diego. During her undergraduate, Yuqi conducted research on the impact of m6A methylation in RNA on immunotherapy. During her post-baccalaureate work at Fred Hutch, Yuqi developed machine learning models to identify predictive biomarkers of immune checkpoint blocker treatment outcomes, and to explore connections between kinases and cytokines. Yuqi’s graduate research focuses on the regulation of transposable elements in immune cells, with an emphasis on their role in shaping immune responses and reacting to therapeutic interventions.

Carlos is a student in the Bioengineering Graduate Group. Carlos received a B.S. in Bioengineering: Biotechnology from the University of California, San Diego in 2023. During his undergraduate, he conducted research using stable isotope tracing and mass spectrometry to systematically study how metabolic alterations drive aging and diseases such as cancer. His graduate research interests involve deciphering the link between immune cell epigenomic programs and the pathogenesis of autoimmune diseases, along with investigating if common autoimmune-associated genetic variants favorably alter epigenetic events for disease progression. 

Priyadarshini is a postdoctoral researcher at Vahedi Lab. She completed her doctoral work at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi (IIIT-D), India, under the direction of Dr. Debarka Sengupta and Dr. Angshul Majumdar. Her doctoral works bring feature engineering approaches to bear in representing biological entities in low-dimensional space. As a postdoctoral scholar, her research focuses on the extraction of distinctive features from multi-omics data in order to get insightful knowledge about immune cells.

Madhu Sharma is a postdoctoral fellow at the Vahedi Lab. She earned her PhD from the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi (IIIT-D), India, under the supervision of Dr. Vibhor Kumar. During her doctoral research, she focused on understanding the complex interplay of gene ensembles in disease biology, prognosis, and therapy. Her research highlighted the importance of integrated, robust, and personalized algorithms to improve disease diagnosis and therapeutic strategies.

Golnaz Vahedi, a native of Iran, is currently an Associate Professor of Genetics (with tenure) at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. She is also the Co-Director of the Epigenetics Institute and the Deputy Director of the Institute for Immunology and Immune Health (I3H). Golnaz, whose first name is pronounced as gol’naaz, studied Electrical Engineering at Sharif University of Technology in Iran. Sharif University is known for its large number of elite alumni who join the academic world, including the late Maryam Mirzakhani, the first female mathematician to be awarded a Fields Medal. Golnaz received her Ph.D. with Drs. Edward Dougherty and Jean-Francois Chamberland in Electrical Engineering at Texas A&M University. She then joined the laboratory of Dr. John O’Shea at the NIH as a postdoctoral fellow to study the epigenomic regulation of T cells. It was in the O’Shea lab that she found studying the epigenome is similar to dissecting electrical circuits. As an independent investigator, she uses systems-based approaches to understand molecular details of gene regulation in the immune system. She is the recipient of a number of awards including the NIH Director’s Award (twice), NIAID K22 Career Transition Award (perfect score), Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Award, W. W. Smith Charitable Trust, Burroughs Wellcome Fund, and Michael S. Brown New Investigator Research Award. She serves on the advisory boards of Cell Press journal Immunity and Science Immunology and is a standing member of GCAT study section.

Jemy is a Research Specialist B in the Vahedi Lab. She graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 2021 with a BS in Biological Sciences. Her research career started as a member of Pitt’s iGEM team in 2019 where she developed a modular tool for post-translation modification using intein biology. During her final years at Pitt and into her postbacc career until 2024, she worked on understanding the effects of excess IL-18, a susceptibility factor for Still’s Disease/Macrophages Activation Syndrome. It was previously thought that excess IL-18 promotes damage predominantly by CD8 T cell mediated immunopathogy and the role of NK cells in hyperinflammtion was unknown. She discovered that excess IL-18 disrupts NK cell numbers and phenotype resulting in immunodeficiency after infection with an NK-dependent viral challenge. She established how one susceptible factor, excess IL-18, can promote damage through both immunodeficiency and immunopathology depending on the trigger. She hopes to pursue graduate studies and learn more about genetic regulators of immunity and the mechanisms of dysregulation. In the Vahedi lab, she will be looking specifically at the role Ets1-SE locus on Th1 polarization.

Sora is a postdoctoral fellow in Vahedi Lab. She received her Ph.D in biological sciences from UNIST in South Korea (Advisor: Dougu Nam, Ph.D). During her Ph.D, she focused on developing tools for pathway and/or network analysis of genomic and transcriptomic data. She joined Vahedi lab to extend her sight to epigenetic regulation of gene expression. As a postdoc, she is working on developing tools finding architectural stripes in cells from various 3D genomic data. In addition, she is interested in unveiling the secret of stripes. What does it look like? How is it formed? What are the characteristics of it? and what are the roles of it in our cells? Her goal is to solve these problems one by one and discover the cause of diseases in the perspective of 3D structure of the genome.

Abhijeet completed his bachelor’s in Computer Science & Engineering and master’s in Bioinformatics from India. He received his Ph.D. training with Drs. Ming-Ying Leung, Sourav Roy, and Dr. Sangjin Kim in Computational Science at UTEP. His Ph.D. research focused on development and application of machine learning algorithms to analyze high-throughput biological data including microarray, DNA methylation, and RNA-seq data. His current research interests include the application of statistical machine learning methods and computational models on single-cell genomics. His goal as a Postdoc is to gain biological insights from multi-omics and 3D genomic data through computational techniques.