Prospective Graduate Students
If you're considering one of our graduate programs, we have more information about becoming a graduate student.Contact the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems
Health and Bioinformatics
Our faculty and affiliates engage in a broad range of collaborative research projects with our academic, government, and industry partners. While most of our projects expand beyond traditional disciplinary divides, projects in this area are mostly related to genetics and genomics, epidemiology, and population health.
Project abstracts
Microbial Forensics via Minority and Rare Variant Profiles
Lead: Viacheslav Fofanov
Keywords: Bioinformatics, microbial forensics
Our work aims to address one of the major questions in microbial forensics: “did query sample A come from source sample B”? Here, we leverage the advances in high throughput sequencing technologies to enable sample attribution via rare variants – SNPs and indels present in very low frequencies in bacterial populations (as low as 0.1%).
Go Baby Go!
Lead: Kyle Winfree
Keywords: Mobility support, assistive technologies
Work in the Go Baby Go! project supports a variety of work aimed at developing mobility support technologies, such as developing customized toy cars with accessible control and harness support systems to help enable children with movement disabilities explore their world. Related work is using data loggers to record when, and for how long, a child uses the car to investigate the impact of car use. In addition, this work is helping inform the development of systems to support adult stroke survivors through a house-scale harness system.
Pathogen Detection and Transmission in Wildlife Reservoirs
Lead: Viacheslav Fofanov
Keywords: Bioinformatics, pathogen detection
Our group is working on developing, testing, and implementing accurate and cost-effective bacterial and fungal pathogen detection approaches to enable sustainable long-term monitoring and surveillance of wildlife reservoirs. Our focus is on one such important wild animal order, Chiroptera (bats), which is a very successful mammalian order with more than 1,200 species of bats distributed across all regions of the planet, except the Arctic, Antarctic, and some island chains.