John Varga
John earned his PhD in Biological Sciences from Virginia Tech in 2006 studying the pathogenesis and physiology of Clostridium perfringens. He followed up with a post-doc at TIGR / the J. Craig Venter Institute from 2006 until 2010, studying the quorum sensing networks of Burkholderia mallei, B. pseudomallei, and B. thailandensis. A brief post-doc at the University of Virginia lasted until 2012, when the lab moved to Emory University where he continued as a post-doc until November 2017, during which time he began cystic fibrosis-based research studying B. cepacia complex genomics, B. cenocepacia pathogenesis, and microbiome composition in people with CF.
Starting at Georgia Tech in November of 2017 as a research scientist, he is managing the lab of Dr. Brown and contributing to wet lab investigations of the CF microbiome.
Yifei Wang
Yifei received a PhD degree in Computer Science in 2016. He also hold a M.Eng. degree in Astronautics Engineering and a B.Eng. degree in Computer Science. Yifei has a strong interest in a broad area of systems biology and collective intelligence. He previously worked as a post-doc in the Brown lab on understanding evolutionary dynamics of complex interactions in bacteria. Combining mathematical modeling and stochastic simulations of agent-based modeling approaches, he was working on building computation models to test hypotheses raise from observations in microbial experiments. He also employs cooperation and communication theories inspired from various research fields, for example, in animal or human societies to study behaviors and consequences for microbes and vice versa.
Currently, Dr Wang is a research scientist in the Brown lab and focuses on data integration for patients with Cystic Fibrosis (CF). Specifically, he develops, manages and maintains a cloud-base high-quality computational infrastructure on AWS that supports access to integrated clinical, lab and research data.