Leadership

Mihai Pop, professor of computer science with an appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), directs CHIB activities at the College Park campus. Pop's research interests cover several areas of bioinformatics, primarily related to the development of computational algorithms for analyzing biological data generated through high-throughput experimental techniques, such as sequencing technologies. His research is driven by the belief that there is a strong connection between computational and biological research, computation being not just a simple tool in the hands of biologists, but an integral component of current biological research.

Owen White, professor of public health and epidemiology in the University of Maryland School of Medicine and associate director for bioinformatics at the Institute for Genome Sciences, directs CHIB activities in Baltimore. White researches huge strings of sequencing data from genomic and biomedical researchers, using computer analyses such as pairwise searches, multiple sequence alignments and other methods in combination with systematic manual evaluation. He has participated in the development of numerous tools for genome comparison, including analysis of plant, fungal, malarial, trypanosomid, Archaeal and Prokaryotic species.

Jacquelyn Meisel is the inaugural Center for Health-related Informatics and Bioimaging (CHIB) Fellow. Her research focuses on using high-throughput next-generation sequencing technologies to better understand the role of the microbiome in health and disease. Meisel is also interested in characterizing structural variants in metagenomic datasets. She is collaborating on several projects with researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, including projects aimed at characterizing the role of the microbiome in diarrheal disease (with O. Colin Stine, Ph.D.), pre-term birth (with Mary Regan, Ph.D., RN), and traumatic brain injury (with David Loane, Ph.D.). Meisel received her doctorate in genomics and computational biology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2017.