Dr. Rakesh Kaundal
Department of Plants, Soils and Climate
Assistant Professor, Bioinformatics
Center for Integrated BioSystems
(College of Agriculture and Applied Sciences)
Director, Bioinformatics Facility
Department of Computer Science
(College of Science)
Adjunct Assistant Professor
Biography
Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
Highly successful track record of integrating biology and bigdata analytics with over 14 years’ experience in bioinformatics, computational biology, and scientific programming. In-depth knowledge of bioinformatics data analysis tools and databases, information management, and integration to support diverse activities essential for organismal improvement and genomics-enabled studies.
Research Interests
Next-generation sequencing data (analysis, alignment, assembly, annotation); Computational modeling of -omics big data; Systems biology, develop algorithms to study intra- and inter-species interaction networks (e.g. host-pathogen interactions), predict Gene Regulatory Networks; Metagenomics (e.g. rhizosphere microbiome interacting with the host); Computational genomics. Develop workflows to facilitate data mining; Develop and maintain scientific software/tools.
Rousselene B. Larson
Bioinformatics Scientist
Rousselene Larson is a researcher at Utah State University with expertise in Bioinformatics. She works collaboratively with interdisciplinary scholars to comprehend research objectives and provide informatics solutions to projects involving NGS data analysis. She is proficient in Unix/Linux shell scripting, R, Python, Perl, and a range of bioinformatics tools/packages. Her sequence analysis comprises of genome assembly, RNA-seq, Bisulfite_seq, and SNP analysis.
Raghav Kataria
PhD Student | PSC
Raghav is a PhD scholar from India. He worked as a Senior Research Fellow at Punjab Agricultural University (PAU, India) before joining the KAABiL. With a research focus on bioinformatics, he is currently working on pathogen-host protein-protein interactions using computational tools and various molecular biology techniques.
David Guevara
PhD Student | CS
David is a CS PhD student from Colombia. He worked full-time as a full-stack software developer for 6 years while finishing his bachelor's degree in Software and Computer Engineering and got a MSc. degree in Computational Biology. His interests are software development, database administration, machine learning, and deep learning. He likes soccer, videogames, and playing music.
Simardeep Kaur
PhD | Plant Biochemistry
Miss Simardeep Kaur is a Nehru Doctoral Fulbright fellow at KAABiL Laboratory, USU. Her doctoral thesis focuses on deciphering the microRNA related modulations in contrasting rice genotypes under drought stress. As a Fulbright fellow she will be learning bioinformatic tools and softwares for comprehensive analysis of the data generated from her molecular biology related work from wet-lab experiments. She will be improving her skills to handle larger data set like those for methylome, transcriptome, lncRNAs, miRNAs, validation techniques and their analysis so that she can integrate molecular biology with bioinformatics to develop the drought tolerant agricultural crops.
Colin Bernhardt
HPC Administrator | BSc Computer Engineering
Colin is the systems administrator for the High-Performance Computer that is in the Bioinformatics Lab. In his spare time, he likes to work on designing a Robotic Autonomous Vehicle with the AVC team. He is a passionate Linux user and loves to program. He is currently studying computer engineering at Utah State University.
Kolton Hauck
BSc Biological Engineering
Kolton is a Biological Engineering major and is working on a minor in Computer Science. He wants to use computers to solve modern-day biological problems. He enjoys eating, sleeping and working out.
Andrew Jouffray
BSc Computer Science
Andrew Jouffray is a computer science student and software developer. He currently works on developing a method to create datasets for deep learning image recognition tasks, enabling robots to generate their own training data.