DCMB Industry Day

Dr. Stephanie Thiede pursued her PhD in the Microbiology & Immunology Program (under PIBS) in the lab of Dr. Evan Snitkin, where she applied genomic epidemiology to study the evolution and transmission of antibiotic-resistant bacterial pathogens. After pursuing an internship at Tempus AI during her PhD, she joined the team full time as a computational biologist upon graduation in 2021. At Tempus AI, Stephanie contributes to the development, validation, and clinical deployment of biomarker algorithms for precision oncology built on clinical and genomic data. While at UM, she was involved in building the inaugural chapter of DCMB’s Girls Who Code and was an instructor for Software Carpentry.

Dr. Gabrielle Dotson, an Arizona native, earned her B.S. in Bioengineering from Stanford University in 2017 and her Ph.D. in Computational Medicine & Bioinformatics from the University of Michigan in 2022, under the mentorship of Dr. Indika Rajapakse. Her doctoral research focused on the dynamics and control of genome organization in cells, integrating biology and mathematics to uncover drivers of cell state. Currently, Gabrielle is a Bioinformatics Scientist at bit.bio, a cell therapy start-up based in Cambridge, UK. She leads initiatives in perturbation prediction modeling and gene regulatory network inference towards human iPSC-derived cellular reprogramming efforts. This marks her first role in industry, following prior experience in government labs, including internships and a postbac position at the NIH's National Human Genome Research Institute. Outside of science, Gabrielle enjoys playing piano, bouldering at her local rock climbing gym, and traveling.

Dr. Calin Voichita has a background in bioinformatics. He earned a Bachelor of Science from Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, România, in 2006. He then obtained a Master’s and Doctorate in Computer Science from Wayne State University in Detroit, MI, in 2010 and 2013, respectively.

Following his graduation, he joined Advaita Bioinformatics, where he led the development of products for differential analysis of genes and gene networks, partially based on methods proposed during his doctoral studies. This work resulted in the launch of three products, which have been used by more than ten thousand users, including several major pharmaceutical companies. His experience in developing large-scale solutions led him to transition toward cloud technologies. He currently works at Amazon Web Services (AWS), contributing to the development of Amazon Linux, a security-focused, stable, and high-performance execution environment for cloud application development and deployment.

Douglas Maldonado-Torres is a bioinformatician for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. He earned an undergraduate degree in Genomics and Molecular Genetics with a minor in Global Public Health and Epidemiology from Michigan State University between 2019 and 2022. He then pursued a Master's of Science in Bioinformatics at the University of Michigan from 2022 to 2023.

In his current role, he is responsible for developing and maintaining reproducible and scalable pipelines for the surveillance of various infectious agents. His career in bioinformatics began during an internship at the Van Andel Research Institute, where he gained experience in fundamental Bash and Python scripting for biological analysis. This experience prompted his transition from laboratory-based approaches to computational methods for addressing biological challenges.

Dr. Hani Habra is a lifelong Michigan resident and a graduate of the DCMB in 2022, where he earned a masters and a PhD specializing in metabolomics data analysis. After his graduation, Habra did a federal postdoctoral associate term at the National Institute of Standards & Technologies (NIST) in Maryland, working within the Mass Spectrometry Data Center. Currently, Habra is a bioinformatician at Michigan State University, working to establish resources and data analysis pipelines at the mass spectrometry metabolics core(MSMC).