WALL LAB - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Rotating Graduate Student ( Fall 2014 )
Albee is a first-year graduate student in the Biomedical Informatics PhD program at Stanford. She graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 2013 and stayed as a research assistant the following year. As her senior thesis, she examined the effects of genetic drift in the Mennonite population, a genetic isolate. She has also analyzed exome sequencing and DNA microarray data to uncover genes enriched in rare deleterious variants in patients with Hirschsprung's Disease (a multifactorial disorder with non-Mendelian inheritance patterns). She is very excited to join the Wall Lab for her first rotation as well as become part of the collaborative effort to study Autism. Specifically, she will be looking into relationships between the output of Autism behavioral classifiers and patients' genetic profiles.
Dr. Lancaster holds a faculty appointment in the Department of Pathology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and is also a Research Associate at the Center for Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and collaborated with the Wall lab at Stanford University. He works in the emerging discipline of evolutionary systems biology involving a combination of empirical genomics and bioinformatics, collaborations with wet-lab experimentalists as well as mathematical modeling and simulation. Read more at Dr. Lancaster's web page at Harvard (http://scholar.harvard.edu/lancaster).
Job Titles:
- Video Analyst, Research Assistant
Job Titles:
- Bioinformatics Research Intern
Alp is an undergraduate in the computer science major's biocomputation track at stanford. He is currently working on updating Genotator and Autworks with new data.
Job Titles:
- Mobile Application Developer
Arman joined the Wall Lab team in April 2019 as a Mobile Application Developer after graduating from San Francisco State University with a degree in Computer Science. Arman is working on the Guess What? application at the Wall Lab, which is one of the primary data collection tools for research conducted at the Wall Lab. His future interests include creating software that assists underserved populations. In his free time Arman's favorite hobbies are basketball, outdoor activity and spending quality time with his family.
Arman joined the Wall Lab team in April 2019 as a Mobile Application Developer after graduating from San Francisco State University with a degree in Computer Science. Arman is working... Read more
Azar joined the Wall Lab in January 2015 as a Research Assistant working on Autism Glass project. She graduated from Stanford with a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering, majoring in Software and Hardware systems. She collaborated on the Autism Glass project as a research Data analyst. Her work includes, but is not limited to, Applying Machine Learning and Computer Vision techniques for face detection and automatic facial expression recognition that runs on Google Glass and delivers instantaneous social cues to people with autism in their natural environment.
Bongjun Ko is an AI Engineering Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) working to develop and apply artificial intelligence technologies for high-stake situations involving humans. In the Wall Lab, he is currently participating in a project developing machine-learning methods for helping children with autism through computer vision. Before joining Stanford HAI in September 2019, he worked as a Research Staff Member and Research Manager at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center since 2006, from which he is currently on a leave-of-absence. In IBM Research, he led the research effort to develop AI technologies for Internet of Things (IoT) systems and applications and also worked on various research projects related to distributed systems, micro cloud, edge computing, and network analytics and management. He was an IBM Master Inventor (2013-2019), holding 40+ US patents, and served in invention development advisory/review board in IBM. Prior to joining IBM Research, he worked as a Senior Member of Research Staff in Philips Research North America, and as a research engineer in LG Electronics, Korea. In 1999, he co-founded a start-up, NeoMTel, Inc., in which he developed a new mobile animation codec that was shipped in more than 100 million mobile phones worldwide at the time. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University in 2006, and B.S. and M.S. degrees from Seoul National University in South Korea.
Job Titles:
- Bioengineering PhD Student
Brianna joined the lab in summer 2018. She is in the Bioengineering Ph.D. program. She graduated with a B.S. in Bioengineering and Applied Physics from Yale University in 2015, and was a previous software engineer at Google.
She is interested in developing and applying statistical methods, machine learning paradigms, and multimodal data techniques to address outstanding questions and challenges in genomics and health informatics, including those in the iHART and microbiome projects.
Brianna joined the lab in summer 2018. She is in the Bioengineering Ph.D. program. She graduated with a B.S. in Bioengineering and Applied Physics from Yale University in 2015, and... Read more
Job Titles:
- Professor Emeritus at Stanford University
Dr. Feinstein's clinical focus is towards child and adolescent psychiatry, and the psychotherapeutic processes.
Catalin Voss is a German student entrepreneur at Stanford University. Voss founded the computer vision startup Sension during his freshman year at Stanford's startup accelerator StartX, where he is an Innovator in Residence. Sension gained traction for developing expression recognition software used in education and for developing a Google Glass app to aid people with Autism in recognizing social cues. Before, Voss worked in mobile software engineering with the startup PayNearMe. Voss grew up and graduated from Leonardo Da Vinci Gymnasium high school near Heidelberg, Germany. He was interested in technology from a young age. When he was twelve, he taught himself the basics of mobile software development when iPhone apps first became popular. A year later, he started a German podcast about iOS development. Voss's tutorials quickly gained > 200,000 views and became the #1 podcast on the German iTunes store. In 2009, he began working with a startup in Stuttgart on iPhone apps for the U.S. Army stationed in Europe and launched five applications before he turned 15. Steve Capps hired Voss as a software engineer in 2010 to work on his Silicon Valley startup PayNearMe's mobile product. Voss worked on the company's iPhone, Android, and web platforms and helped launch a mobile cash payments platform. In 2012, Voss joined Stanford University at age 17 to pursue a degree in Computer Science (advisee of Professors Terry Winograd and Jerry Cain). During the same year, Voss advised the executive team of Germany's largest media company Axel Springer on structuring a technology partnership between a Silicon Valley outpost and Germany. His role gained national attention when the German magazine DER SPIEGEL covered his work in 2013. Today, As an IIR in the StartX program, Voss advises StartX's founders on mobile engineering.
Catalin Voss is a German student entrepreneur at Stanford University. Voss founded the computer vision startup Sension during his freshman year at Stanford's startup accelerator StartX, where he is an... Read more
Job Titles:
- Connell / Medical Student Researcher
- Medical Student Researcher
Chloe is joining the lab this summer to investigate the role of eQTLs and sex differences in the genetics of autism. As an undergrad at Brown University, she worked on a pathways-based analysis of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder GWAS data to identify gene sets of potential significance in these disorders. After completing her honors thesis on approach and avoidance learning... Read more
Chloe is joining the lab this summer to investigate the role of eQTLs and sex differences in the genetics of autism. As an undergrad at Brown University, she worked on a pathways-based analysis of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder GWAS data to identify gene sets of potential significance in these disorders. After completing her honors thesis on approach and avoidance learning in OCD and graduating in 2012, she spent a year teaching and tutoring at the Match Charter Public High School in Boston before entering Stanford Medical School in the fall of 2013.
Currently, she is interested in potential sex differences in the genetic architecture of autism. Specifically, she aims to use eQTL data from brain tissue to focus in on potential genetic variants that may confer risk for autism. By limiting hypotheses of genetic tests to variants with plausible biological mechanisms of causality, the hope is to limit false positives and improve the power of testing. She is also interested in the sex-specific nature of the disorder (autism is 4x more common in males than it is in females). She plans to use eQTL data to conduct sex-specific analyses of autism genetic data to investigate whether different genes are associated with the disorder in males vs. females.
While not working or studying, Chloe loves to bike, run, and hike. She also loves to swim, but is so terrible at it that she is taking a swimming class at Stanford this summer with the hopes that she will be able to officially call it a hobby.
Job Titles:
- Computer Science Master 's Student
I am awesome and like to ride motorcycles. I have a horse.
D Bravo, M Gaëtan, David MM , G Cailleu, E Verrecchia, P Junier. Identification of active oxalotrophic bacteria by Bromodeoxyuridine DNA-labeling in a microcosm soil experiments. FEMS Microbiol Lett. 2013. 348(2):103-111. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1574-6968.12244
J Bælum, E Prestat, David MM , B Strobel, and C Jacobsen. Modelling phenoxy acid herbicide mineralization and growth of microbial degraders in 15 soils monitored by quantitative real-time PCR of the functional tfdA gene. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 2012. 78(15):5305-12. http://dx.doi.org/10.1128/AEM.00990-12
R Mackelprang, MP Waldrop, KM Deangelis, David MM , KL Chavarria, SJ Blazewicz, EM Rubin and JK Jansson. Metagenomic analysis of a permafrost microbial community reveals a rapid response to thaw. Nature. 2011.480(7377):368-71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature10576
A Nemir, David MM , R Perrussel, A Sapkota, P Simonet, JM Monier and TM Vogel. Comparative phylogenetic microarray analysis of microbial communities in TCE-contaminated soils. Chemosphere. 2010. (80):600-607. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chemosphere.2010.03.036
Job Titles:
- Principal Investigator
- Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the Stanford University School of Medicine
Dennis Wall is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the Stanford University School of Medicine, where his lab is developing novel approaches in systems biology to decipher the molecular pathology... Read more
Dennis Wall is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the Stanford University School of Medicine, where his lab is developing novel approaches in systems biology to decipher the molecular pathology of autism spectrum disorder and related neurological disorders.
Dr. Wall received his doctorate in Integrative Biology from the University of California, Berkeley, where he pioneered the use of fast evolving gene sequences to trace population-scale diversification across islands. Then, with a postdoctoral fellowship award from the National Science Foundation, he went on to Stanford University to address broader questions in systems biology and computational genomics, work that resulted in comprehensive functional models for both protein mutation and protein interaction.
Dr. Wall has acted as science advisor to several biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, has developed cutting-edge approaches to cloud computing, and has received numerous awards, including an NSF postdoctoral fellowship, the Fred R. Cagle Award for Outstanding Achievement in Biology, the Vice Chancellor's Award for Research, three awards for excellence in teaching, and the Harvard Medical School Leadership award.
Emilie is a Research Data Analyst in the Wall Lab. Prior to Stanford, Emilie was a Data Scientist at AgilOne for other two years. Emilie completed her Masters in Engineering at Ecole Centrale Paris specializing in Applied Mathematics and a Master of Science in Data Science and Business Analytics at ESSEC Business School Paris.
Guhan, an undergraduate senior majoring in Bioengineering and minoring in Computer Science, joined the Wall Lab in January 2016. He has since worked on the iHART autism genomics project and has done network burden analyses downstream of the main study. He hopes to be a graduate student in Biomedical Informatics.
Guhan enjoys eating copious amounts of food, sleeping for copious amounts of time, and copious amounts of Netflix binge-watching. He also enjoys playing his instrument, the veena, and performs widely throughout the country. He is the President of the Indian classical music club, Spicmacay Stanford.
He used to enjoy running before college took away his work ethic.
Haik joined the Wall Lab in August of 2017 as a Postdoctoral Researcher. In 2016, he graduated with a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles. Previously, he completed an MS and BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles, and University of Washington, respectively. Haik is interested in embedded systems development, machine... Read more
Heidi joined the Wall Lab in September 2018. She recently graduated from San Jose State University with a B.S. in Public Health and a concentration in Health Services Administration. During her time at San Jose State University, she was Co-President for the Department of Health Science and Recreation Convocation Committee, a member of the Health Science Honors Society, a Public Health Peer Advisor, a Teaching Assistant for the Community Health Promotion course, and an intern at Kaiser Permanente. She is passionate about working with communities to create programs that lower health disparities.
Job Titles:
- Research Finance Operations Manager
Henry joined the Division of Pediatric Systems Medicine at Stanford University in Sep 2019 as Division Manager. He earned a B.A. in Psychology at the University of California, Irvine. His... Read more
Henry joined the Division of Pediatric Systems Medicine at Stanford University in Sep 2019 as Division Manager. He earned a B.A. in Psychology at the University of California, Irvine. His background is in research administration and management, where he's spent over 10 years at various institutions (UCLA, CHLA, UC Berkeley, and now Stanford) assisting faculty members manage their research portfolios as well as providing guidance in finance, HR, and operations.
E Prestat *& David MM *, J Hultman, N Taş, R Lamendella, J Dvornik, R Mackelprang, D Myrold, A. Jumpponen, S. Tringe, E. Holman, K. Mavromatis, JK. Jansson. Functional Ontology Assignments for Metagenomes: a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) database with environmental focus. Nucleic Acids Res. 2014. 42(19):e145. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/nar/gku702 *the first two authors should be regarded as joint First Authors
Jack joined the Wall Lab in January 2019 as a website and database developer. He completed his Bachelors and Masters degrees in music performance at the University of California, Los... Read more
Job Titles:
- Bioinformatics PhD Student
Jack spent two summers in the lab as an intern in 2010 and 2011. In 2012, he graduated from the University of Northern Iowa with a BS in Bioinformatics and a BA in Biology and began his PhD in the Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics program at Harvard co-mentored by Dennis Wall and Mark Daly. Currently, he is involved in a... Read more
Jae-Yoon Jung joined the lab in 2009. His current work involves developing new methodologies for finding plausible gene-disease associations among mental disorders. He is also involved in developing next generation... Read more
James Maniscalco joined the lab in June 2011 as a co-op student. He spends his time developing Django apps for autism research. A physics student at Northeastern University, he devoted a semester to full-time work at the Wall Lab.
Job Titles:
- Clinical Operations Manager
Jena joined the Wall Lab in 2012 after graduating from Boston University. Jena manages the lab's clinical trials, acts as the liaison for collaborations, research participants, investigators, study teams, and healthcare professionals. She also works with the IRB and oversees the preparation, submission, recruitment processes, modification and renewal for these protocols. She ensures the safety of clinical research subjects, compliance, adherence to approved protocols, and coordinates clinical treatment, study visits, and follow-up care as it pertains to the trials.
Outside of work, you will find her at the beach, hiking, horseback riding, playing soccer, snowboarding, or practicing yoga. She is also a proud owner of one of the lab's mascots, Emma (blue merle border collie).
Jenna joined the lab in January 2012 along with another Jena in an effort to confuse those of us who are bad with names. She is researching ways that technology such as iPad apps can help individuals with autism and is also working on various aspects of the Autworks video project.
Jenna is currently a graduate student at Boston University majoring in Occupational Therapy. She is known among her peers and coworkers for having an obsession with dogs and babies. When she isn't working or studying, she enjoys cooking, hiking, singing, volunteering, and traveling.
Job Titles:
- Clinical Research Coordinator
Jessey joined the lab in 2016 after graduating from Carnegie Mellon University with a B.A. in Psychology. She works on the clinical aspects of the lab, regularly recruiting and working with participant families, managing data, and organizing study procedures and protocols. In her spare time, she enjoys playing music, practicing yoga, hiking, photography, painting pottery, and watching critically-acclaimed movies alongside... Read more
Job Titles:
- Rotating Graduate Student ( Fall 2014 )
Jessica Torres
Rotating Graduate Student (Fall 2014)
Jessica is a graduate student in the BMI program at Stanford University.
Job Titles:
- Clinical Research Coordinator
Kaiti joined the lab in May 2018 from North Carolina after working as a research specialist at UNC-Chapel Hill. Prior to her work at UNC, she completed a Masters in... Read more
Job Titles:
- Biomedical Informatics PhD Student
Kelley joined the lab in August 2016. Her background is in computational math and software development for bioinformatics. She has a BS in Mathematics from MIT and received her MS... Read more
Khaled joined the lab as an undergraduate researcher in October 2017. He is currently an undergraduate student at Stanford University, where he is studying Mathematics and Computer Science. He is investigating mobile and ubiquitous computing technologies in the Wall Lab. He is interested in artificial intelligence, computer vision, and their applications in real world problems. Outside of the lab, he... Read more
Leticia spent two months in the Computational Biology Iniciative in 2009 as a visiting student from the Systems Biology Unit at University of Jaén (Spain), where her research was focused in network analysis approaches applied to autoimmunity. She joined The Wall lab as a graduate student in June 2013. Currently, she is conducting an integrated systems biology analysis of all... Read more
Job Titles:
- Clinical Research Associate
Marlena joined the Wall Lab in January 2011 as a co-op student from Northeastern University, and began full time work as a clinical research associate after graduating with a Bachelor's in Biology in 2013. Currently, her research is geared towards developing novel methods for shortening the behavioral diagnosis of autism and analysis of their efficacy both clinically and computationally. She is also working on applying innovative social media approaches to enhance our understanding of autism and genetic disease as a whole.
In her off hours, she enjoys taking advantage of the California sunshine on a local hike, at the beach or going on a run with her Australian shepherd rescue puppy, Lilah.
Maude joined the lab in January 2014 and namely studies the gut microbiome of children with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) utilizing a large scale, crowd sourced clinical study approach. Her expertise are in microbiology, bioinformatics and genomics, using and integrating metagenomics, metatranscriptomics and metaproteomics to understand microbial community functions. She received her PhD in February 2010 from the Ecole Centrale... Read more
Maude joined the lab in January 2014 and namely studies the gut microbiome of children with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) utilizing a large scale, crowd sourced clinical study approach. Her expertise are in microbiology, bioinformatics and genomics, using and integrating metagenomics, metatranscriptomics and metaproteomics to understand microbial community functions. She received her PhD in February 2010 from the Ecole Centrale de Lyon, University of Lyon, France, with Prof. T.M. Vogel, on the origin of the dehalogenases and bioremediation of chlorinated solvent. Her grad-school work focused on the bacterial adaptation to chlorinated compounds at the genome (evolution mechanisms) and community (bioremediation) level. After graduation, she became a post-doctoral fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory with Prof. Janet Jansson. Her work looked at the impact of climate change on soil microbial ecology and specifically at how altered precipitation affect carbon cycle using meta-"omics" analysis of microbial carbon cycling responses.
Job Titles:
- Associate
- Clinical Research Coordinator
Maya joined the Wall Lab in October 2021. She graduated with honors from UCLA with a B.S. in Neuroscience, where she researched the neuromodulation of memory and emotion circuits with... Read more
Maya joined the Wall Lab in June 2014. She is currently an undergraduate student at Stanford, where she is studying engineering. She is the 2016 Intel STS First Place award winner in the innovation category, and she has presented her research at the 2016 White House Science Fair. Maya is very interested in the application of computer science tools to healthcare, and her work at the lab focuses on the use of software tools to identify genetic causes of autism.
Job Titles:
- Administrative Associate / Mercedes
Mercedes joins as an Administrative Associate after having worked in the Genetics department.
Michael's main responsibility in the lab is to not break the internet, so if you're reading this, then he's doing his job. In a former life, he was an explorer in Southern China for five years where he satiated his voracious appetite for knowledge, food, and culture. He also finds it weird to write about himself in the third person.... Read more
Michael likes to eat, sleep, and make music. He is terrible at basketball.
Nate joined the Wall Lab in September 2016 working on both the iHART and Autism Glass projects. Graduating with a B.S. in Mathematical and Computational Science in 2012 and a... Read more
Computer Vision for Autism Therapy Nick joined the lab in August 2014 and is working on a project to put social cue recognition and gaze tracking technology on Google... Read more
Job Titles:
- Software Development Intern
Nikhila is a computer science major at Princeton University. She joined the Wall Lab in the summer of 2013, and has since been spearheading GAPMap, a web tool that hopes to enable global autism epidemiology and connect families to fundamental services through the power of crowd-sourcing. In her free time, Nikhila enjoys watching photorealistically animated films, playing piano, and eating/cooking... Read more
Olivia was a co-op student from Northeastern University working in the lab on various aspects of the Autworks project, including public outreach and integrating geodata.
Job Titles:
- Electrical Engineering PhD Student
Cezmi is a PhD student in Electrical Engineering and joined the lab in Spring 2020. Prior to Stanford, he graduated from Middle East Technical University(Turkey) with a BS degree in... Read more
Dr. Tonellato' s research focus is to apply the methods of biomedical informatics, mathematical modeling, and simulations to characterize and predict the use of genetics in medical practice and public health.
Job Titles:
- Bioengineering PhD Student
Peter is a third year Bioengineering PhD student broadly interested in the intersection of AI, HCI, psychiatry, education, and genomics. Prior to this, he completed a MS in CS at... Read more
Preston recently completed his undergraduate education in Bioengineering at Stanford and is pursuing his Master's degree in Computer Science. He is currently working on several exciting projects in the Wall lab, from using machine learning approaches to study autism phenotypic data in hopes of developing advanced diagnostic tools to developing cloud genomic pipelines. When he is not busy hacking away... Read more
Qandeel joined the Wall Lab in June 2017 as a Software Engineer working on Autism Glass project. She recently graduated from Stanford with a Master's Degree in Learning, Design & Technology, with a focus in Education and Data Science. Currently, she is continuing her work in the Autism Glass project as a Data Analyst. Her current focus is to perform data analysis on the video data collected, apply Machine Learning and Computer Vision techniques to improve our emotion recognition system that runs on Google Glass to deliver real time social cues to children diagnosed with Autism.
Ravina Jain joined the lab as a sophomore in September 2015. She is currently an undergraduate student at Stanford studying Human Biology and Computer Science. At the Wall Lab she works on using the data from iHART and developing it into a public platform. On the side she enjoys playing the cello and learning Chinese.
S Demaneche, David MM , E Navarro, P Simonet and TM Vogel. Evaluation of functional gene enrichment in a soil metagenomic clone library. J Microbiol Meth. 2009.76(1):105-7. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mimet.2008.09.009
A data analyst for the Wall Lab. Currently busy compiling autism related data and improving her computational biology skills.
Job Titles:
- Biomedical Informatics PhD Rotation Student
Job Titles:
- Professor Emeritus at Stanford University
Professor Winograd's focus is on human-computer interaction design and the design of technologies for development. He is on a number of journal editorial boards, including Human Computer Interaction, ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interaction, and Informatica. He has advised a number of companies started by his students, including Google. In 2011 he received the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award.
Job Titles:
- Senior Biological Software Engineer
Todd DeLuca is wanted for questioning by authorities in Canada for local dress code violations. At least, according to his bio-page at the Wall Lab for more than five years now.
Tom worked in the Wall Lab from February 2004-May 2009. He has a Bachelor's of Science degree from Case Western Reserve University in Management Science with a core in Information Systems. His professional background is in web application development, enterprise software deployment, and data integration. During his time at the Wall Lab, Tom helped to create cutting-edge bioinformatics tools aimed... Read more
Tristan built web apps with Ruby on Rails, aiming to make the genetics of Autism accessible to both researchers and the wider community.
Vanessa's primary goal in the lab is to use techniques from machine learning, image processing, and large data analysis to discover computational signatures of subtypes of autism spectrum disorder, and use this knowledge to build tools for diagnostic decision support.
Vibhu is a master's student working in the Wall Lab interested in neural networks and deep learning.
Job Titles:
- Clinical Research Coordinator
Yordan joined the lab in October 2019 as a Clinical Research Coordinator Associate. He earned a B.S. in Biology at Davidson College and a Master in Translational Medicine at UC Berkley & UCSF, with a focus on Software as a Medical Device technologies. Previously, he managed a nonprofit organization and founded a social enterprise which employs high school dropouts in Bulgaria, and before that, he launched digital health products optimizing maternal health and clinician staffing in Tanzania.