Postdoctoral researcher

Dr. Muhammad Ali is a bioinformatician by training. He has joined the Cruchaga lab at Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL) as a postdoctoral research associate. His area of expertise is computational system biology, i.e. integrative analysis of multi-omics data from disease-related case-control studies, and network-based predictive disease modeling. In Cruchaga Lab, he is expanding his knowledge in the area of human genetics and performing genome-wide association studies (GWAS) analysis to identify novel and common genetic variants associated with neurodegenerative disorders. He aims at utilizing the multi-omics data from human brain tissues for identifying novel genes implicated in AD, to provide biological context for the risk genes and to identify novel molecular biomarkers and new therapeutic targets.

Maulik is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Cruchaga lab and manages GWAS, RNA-Seq and neuro imaging data. Maulik received his doctoral degree in Bioinformatics from Gujarat University and his Master degree in Bioinformatics from Sardar Patel University. Before joining the lab, he worked as a Project Scientist in Xcelris Genomics for 5 years and as Application Scientist in Bioinnovation for 2.5 years. He collaborated with various universities in the development of pipelines for the analysis of large-scale de-novo assembly, transcriptome, metagenomics and targeted exome data. He also worked on various functional and network analysis of high-throughput multi-omics and metabolomics data. Recently, he designed a 94-gene panel for Alzheimer's disease patients with a diabetic condition to understand early detection and progression of the diseases.

Yuanyuan (Daisy) Shen received her MD and become a fully licensed General Surgeon in China.  After she relocated to U.S., she worked as Clinical Research Fellow for two years at Yale University School of Medicine investigating the tumor biology and glucose metabolism.  Recently she received her Biomedical/Clinical Informatics PhD from the University of Missouri.  During her PhD, she worked on implementing machine learning exploratory methods on multi-omics Pan-cancer studies.

Chengran received his PhD in Human and Statistical Genetics at Washington University with Carlos Cruchaga.  Before joining back the lab as a postdoc, he worked as a Scientist in Statistical Genetics/Computational Biology at Biogen.