Tim O’Sullivan
Tim received his B.S. in Biology in 2013 from Indiana University. He is broadly interested in the evolutionary ecology of infectious disease and uses a mix of both theoretical and experimental approaches to explore within-host infection dynamics of P. aeruginosa in C. elegans and other systems. He is also interested in strategies to manage and mitigate the spread of antimicrobial resistant infections.
Jennifer Rattray
Jennifer received her B.S. in Biology in 2015 from the Georgia Institute of Technology where she worked with Will Ratcliff on the evolution of multicellularity. She is now a biology PhD student at Tech focusing on the social lives of microbes. Her interests span from single cell interactions to population level behaviors and large group dynamics. Jennifer is interested in the application of traditional themes of ecology and evolution on new systems in biology and works primarily with Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Her work is supported by a predoctoral fellowship from the National Science Foundation.
Find her on Twitter @jenniferbethann
Stephen Thomas
Stephen Thomas is a PhD student in the Quantitative BioSciences program. His research focuses on modeling community dynamics and interaction networks. As a PhD student in the Quantitative BioSciences program, Stephen focuses on mathematical models for bacterial communities. His research incorporates non-linear dynamics and network science. Its goal is a better understanding how bacterial communities assemble and evolve with potential applications to the treatment of polymicrobial infections and other diseases.
Juan Castro
Juan Castro is a PhD student in the Bioinformatics program. He is currently exploring how genetic information of bacterial genomes relates to phenotypic traits. His focus is the use of machine learning and mathematical model to find structure and patterns in large datasets. His research is intended to better understand how evolutionary mechanisms shape bacteria abilities to process information and better respond to novel environments.
Conan Zhao
Conan graduated from Washington and Lee University in 2016 with bachelors in physics and math. He started his research career in a physics lab developing ionic self-assembled monolayers (ISAM) models and later joined a CS group where he worked on computer vision-assisted quadcopter navigation. At some point he realized the next logical step was to join an RNA lab to study ribosome collision dynamics during mRNA translation. He initially did wet lab work but after one too many failed qPCRs and blank gels he traded in his pipette for a second monitor and developed monte carlo ribosome collision simulations instead. After graduating, Conan joined the Brown group as a technician. His current work centers on modelling microbiome dynamics and exploring the structure of the CF Lung microbiome using ML techniques. He is also a musician-volunteer at Emory’s Winship Cancer Institute and an avid member of the GT racquetball club.