people

 

Current Group Members:
PI
Ben Raphael (PI). Curriculum Vitae: [PDF]
Ph.D. Students
Max Leiserson (Computational Biology) [NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, 2012-2015]
Ahmad Mahmoody (Computer Science)
Layla Oesper (Computer Science) [NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, 2011-2014]
Anna Ritz (Computer Science), [NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, 2008-2011]
Alexandra Papoutsaki (Computer Science)
Matthew Parks (Applied Mathematics) [Advised with Chip Lawrence]
Hsin-Ta Wu (Computational Biology)
Postdoctoral Fellows and Research Faculty
Suzanne Sindi (Postdoctoral Fellow)
Fabio Vandin (Research Assistant Professor)
Undergraduates
Adrien Deschamps (Applied Mathematics)
Ryan Drebin (Computational Biology)
Edward Rice (Computer Science)
Jason Shum (Computational Biology)
Jovian Yu (Statistics)
Alumni:
    Sarah Aerni (Visting from Stanford BMI)
  • Ali Bashir [Now at Mount Sinai School of Medicine] (Visiting from UCSD Bioinformatics)
  • Nadiva Brown (High School, Summer 2011) [Soon at Providence College]
  • Jonathan Eldridge (Sc.B. 2011) [Now at Microsoft]
  • Crystal Kahn (Ph.D. 2010) [Now at Ab Initio] [NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, 2005-2008]
  • Selim Onal (Sc.M. 2010) [Now at Google]
  • Borislav Hristov (Sc.B./Sc.M. 2010) [Now at Oracle]
  • Brendan Hickey (Sc.M. 2009) [Now at Google]
  • Elena Helman (Sc.B., Honors Thesis 2008) [Now at MIT HST Ph.D. Program]
  • Eric Lim (Sc.M. 2007) [Ph.D. Brown Biology 2011]
  • Erik Corona (undergraduate) [Now at Stanford Biomedical Informatics Ph.D. Program]
  • Ray Brown (undergraduate)
  • Malinda Yeh (undergraduate)
Ben Raphael Scientific Biography.
 

Ben Raphael joined Brown University in September 2006 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Center for Computational Molecular Biology. His research focuses on the design of combinatorial and statistical algorithms for the interpretation of genomes. Current research interests include next-generation DNA sequencing, structural variation, genome rearrangements in cancer and evolution, and network analysis of somatic mutations in cancer. Earlier research included topics in comparative genomics, multiple sequence alignment, and motif finding. He is the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship.

From 2002-2006, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Bioinformatics Group at the University of California, San Diego led by Professor Pavel Pevzner, supported by a postdoctoral fellowship in Computational Molecular Biology from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and by a Career Award at the Scientific Interface from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.

He received my Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of California, San Diego in 2002 under the supervision of Jim Agler. His doctoral research was in operator theory, specifically on certain problems related to functional calculus of linear operators on Hilbert space.  Many of the results from his Ph.D. thesis "A Computational Investigation of Spectral Sets and Rational Dilations Over Multiply-Connected Domains" appear in this monograph.  

He received an S.B. in Mathematics with a minor in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996.  As an undergraduate, he worked with Jim Propp on problems in combinatorics, and worked in the laboratory of David Page at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.

Curriculum Vitae: [PDF]