Madeleine Dawson

3rd year PhD in Ocean Sciences

PROJECT TITLE: Island Wake Segmentation and Characterization from Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery: A Deep Learning Approach

MENTORS:
David R. Chapman, PhD | Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, College of Arts and Sciences | Knight Foundation Junior Chair of Data Science and AI | IDSC Core Faculty Member
Hans Graber, ScD  |  Professor, Department of Ocean Sciences, Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science
Executive Director, Center for Southeastern Tropical Advanced Remote Sensing (CSTARS)

Madeleine is currently an Ocean Science Ph.D. student working with Dr. Hans Graber at the Rosenstiel School of marine, atmospheric, and earth sciences. She received her Bachelor of Science in Biological Engineering from the University of Missouri-Columbia before beginning her Ph.D. at the University of Miami. Her current research is focused on the characterization of island wakes through spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar datasets. As an IDSC fellow, the utilization of deep learning techniques will aid in classifying highly dynamic and turbulent features of the island wakes to create accurate parameterizations for future predictions.

Anna Golikova

Senior, majoring in Biology

PROJECT TITLE: Identification of bacterial viruses in two reef-building corals, Pseudodiploria strigosa and Montastraea cavernosa

MENTORS:
Ravi Vadapalli, PhD | Director, Advanced Computing, IDSC
Cynthia Silveira, PhD | Assistant Professor, Department of Biology, College of Arts and Sciences | silveiralab.com

Anna is a Senior majoring in Biology with minors in Chemistry, Computer Science, and Psychology.

After learning about viral diversity in the “Biology of Viruses” course offered at the University of Miami, she joined Silveira lab to delve deeper into marine viral ecology. She started working on the project that aimed to isolate and identify seawater viruses that infect coral-associated bacteria and may be involved in coral diseases. As an IDSC Fellow, she hopes to conduct bioinformatics analysis, including genome annotations and comparative genomics study, of her isolated bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria) and their hosts to explore how bacterial viruses could contribute to the emergence of pathogens in coral reefs.

Tianhao Liu

3rd year PhD in Biostatistics

PROJECT TITLE: Spectral Graph Theory Methods Using Eigenpairs With Small Eigenvalues

MENTORS:
Kamal Premartne, PhD | Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering
Daniel Andrés Díaz-Pachón, PhD  |  Research Assistant Professor, Biostatistics Division, Department of Public Health Sciences, Miller School of Medicine

Tianhao is a third-year Ph.D. student working under the supervision of Dr. Daniel Díaz at the Division of Biostatistics, University of Miami. He received his M.Sc. in Biostatistics in 2020 from UM. His research centers around pattern recognition and clustering using advanced statistical and machine learning methods. As an IDSC Fellow, he hopes to explore how to make use of the eigenvectors with the smallest eigenvalues in random graph models.

Christian Ramsoomair

3rd year MD/PhD in Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP)

PROJECT TITLE: Locus-Specific Characterization of Transposable Elements in Glioblastoma

MENTORS:
Ravi Vadapalli, PhD | Director, Advanced Computing, IDSC
Ashish H. Shah, MD | Department of Neurological Surgery, Miller School of Medicine

Christian is an MD/PhD student in his first year of graduate studies working under the mentorship of Drs. Danny Reinberg and Ashish Shah in the Sheila and David Fuente Graduate Program in Cancer Biology. He received his Bachelor of Liberal Arts in Chemistry (concentration in Biochemistry) from College of the Holy Cross. During the IDSC Fellows program, he is seeking to characterize the role of retroelements in Glioblastoma.