People

RonDoRon Do, Ph.D. [Faculty profile]

Principal Investigator

Ron is the Charles Bronfman Professor in Personalized Medicine and full Professor with Tenure in the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences and Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine at Mount Sinai. Ron completed his Ph.D. in Human Genetics at McGill University. He completed postdoctoral training and an instructorship in Human Genetics, Statistical Genetics and Population Genetics at the Center for Human Genetic Research (now Center for Genomic Medicine), Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute.

 

Ghislain Rocheleau, Ph.D.

Research Assistant Professor

Ghislain is a Research Assistant Professor in the Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine and in the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He holds a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Montreal. During his postdoctoral training at McGill University, he actively took part in the first genome-wide association study in type 2 diabetes, and later coauthored several papers in genomic endocrinology. From 2011 to 2016, he was a member of the European Genomic Institute for Diabetes and Maître de Conférences at the University of Lille, France. His research interests focus in the development of new statistical analysis methods applied to genomic data, mainly those generated by genetic association studies.

 

DanBalickDaniel Balick, Ph.D.

Visiting Scientist

Dan is a Visiting Scientist and a longstanding collaborator of the Do lab. He is an instructor and faculty member in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and in the Genetics Division of Brigham & Women’s Hospital. Dan earned his BSH in physics at Stanford and his PhD in theoretical physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara under the guidance of Boris Shraiman at the KITP. He is a mathematical population geneticist primarily interested in modeling a range of non-equilibrium phenomena observed in evolving populations. His recent work focuses on the development of statistical tools to identify human variation evolving under recessive natural selection, the dynamics of linkage disequilibrium, transient behavior of allele frequencies, and on exploring the relationship between the mode of selection and the mode of inheritance of variation responsible for human disease.

 

DanielJordanDaniel Jordan, Ph.D.

Instructor

Daniel is an Instructor in the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences (GGS) at Mount Sinai. He completed a postdoc in GGS (Aug. 2015 – Sept. 2020), jointly mentored by Dr. Ron Do and Dr. Eric Schadt. Daniel completed his Ph.D. in Biophysics at Harvard University in Dr. Shamil Sunyaev’s lab. His research has focused on predicting the effects of missense variation, mainly as seen through the lens of PolyPhen. His major projects has involved developing a clinically useful predictor for a specific phenotype (hypertrophic cardiomyopathy) using clinical data and biophysical insight, and developing a model of intragenic epistasis and how it affects PolyPhen’s predictions.

 

Ha My Vy, Ph.D.

Research Scientist

Ha My is a research scientist in the Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She completed her B.S. in Theoretical Physics at Hanoi National University of Education in Vietnam and earned her Ph.D. in population genetics at Ewha Womans University in South Korea. During her Ph.D., Ha My has worked on developing theoretical tools for detecting incomplete selective sweeps from sequence polymorphism and applying them to Drosophila population genomic data. Her current research focuses on investigating the impact of natural selection on human biology and disease.

 

Áine Duffy, M.Sc.

Ph.D. student

Áine is currently a Ph.D. student in the Do lab and is in the Genetics and Data Sciences track at Mount Sinai. Previously, she was an Associate Bioinformatician in December 2017, co-mentored by Dr. Ron Do and Dr. Girish Nadkarni. Áine completed her undergraduate degree in Biochemistry and her Master’s degree in Biomedical Genomics at the National University of Ireland, Galway. During her Master’s, her main project encompassed analyzing small RNA sequencing data for the presence of double strand break induced small rnas (diRNAs).

 

Iain Forrest, B.Sc.

M.D., Ph.D. student

Iain S. Forrest graduated summa cum laude from the University of Maryland, College Park with a B.S. in Cellular Biology & Molecular Genetics. During his time at University, he was a student researcher in developmental biology in Dr. Leslie Pick’s lab and investigated how genes change over evolutionary time to form a diverse array of insect body plans. Concurrently, Iain was a student researcher in genetic ophthalmology in Dr. Brian Brooks’ lab at the National Eye Institute at the NIH, where he interrogated the genetic basis of two debilitating human eye diseases via CRISPR-Cas9 mutagenesis and iPSC models. Now, Iain is a third year MD-PhD student at the Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai and joined Dr. Ron Do’s lab as a graduate student in 2019. He is interested in innovating and applying human genetic approaches to advance precision medicine for complex human diseases. This includes 1) conducting GWASs in the UK Biobank and Mount Sinai’s BioMe Biobank, 2) generating polygenic risk scores for patients afflicted with diseases such as diabetes and coronary artery disease, and 3) tailoring treatment for patients based on their unique genomic risk profile. In his free time, Iain is a singer-songwriter/cellist-electric cellist known as Eyeglasses, and performs at weddings, restaurants, in the streets and subways of cities and at hospitals.

 

Ben Omega Petrazzini, B.Sc.

Associate Bioinformatician

Ben Omega graduated in Biological Sciences from Universidad de la República, Uruguay. During his time at University he worked in the Bioinformatics Unit, Institut Pasteur Montevideo, where he developed a machine Learning-based method to predict non-coding pathogenic variants and an S3 R-package to test imputation accuracy in variant annotation data. Ben Omega joined the Do lab as an Associate Bioinformatician in September 2020. Since then, he has been using electronic health records and genetics data from Mount Sinai’s BioMe Biobank and UK Biobank to develop machine Learning-based risk assessment methods for a number of diseases, including coronary artery disease and Heart Failure. Furthermore, he is developing a method to predict coding variant pathogenicity with applications to novel disease gene discovery. Ben Omega plans to continue his training by enrolling in a PhD program.

 

Josh Park, B.Sc.

M.D., Ph.D. student

Josh is an MD/PhD student at Mount Sinai who joined the Do Lab in June 2021. He obtained a B.S. in Neuroscience from Johns Hopkins, where he studied the intratumoral heterogeneity of pancreatic cancer metabolism. After college, he pursued an NIH fellowship to study endocannabinoid signaling in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, which contributed to a small molecule that is now in clinical trials. His current work is focused on identifying novel causes of coronary heart disease and leveraging ML/AI methods to advance personalized medicine in cardiology. In his free time, Josh enjoys surfing, reading memoirs, and practicing Spanish.

 

Robert Chen,B.Sc.

M.D., Ph.D. student

Robert Chen is a MD/PhD Student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where he works on machine learning and genetics. Previously, he was a Vagelos Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, where he worked on CAR T cell development and hemophilia A inhibitors in the laboratories of Vijay Bhoj and Ben Samelson-Jones.

 

Joan Shang,B.Sc.

M.D., Ph.D student

Joan Shang is currently an MD/PhD at Mount Sinai in the labs of Dr. Jeremiah Faith and Dr. Ron Do. Previously, she pursued an undergraduate degree in Biology from Emory University. For the initial four years of her PhD program at Mount Sinai, Joan was actively involved in the lab of Dr. Jeremiah Faith. Her primary focus was to elucidate the pivotal role played by the microbiome in the response to cancer immunotherapy and immune-related adverse events.
As Joan entered her fifth year of the PhD program, she joined Dr. Ron Do’s lab to combine her interests with data sciences. Joan uses electronic health records sourced from Mount Sinai Data Warehouse, with the aim to develop machine learning-based risk assessment methods for coronary artery disease.

 

Alumni

Geneviève Galarneau, Ph.D. Postdoctoral fellow from 2015 to 2016 Now Statistical Genetics Lead, Celmatix, New York.
Marie Verbanck, Ph.D. Postdoctoral fellow from 2016 – 2019 Now Assistant Professor at Université Paris Descartes, Paris, France.
Lee Dobbyn, Ph.D. Postdoctoral fellow from 2017 – 2019 Now Associate Manager, Statistical Genetics at Regeneron Genetics Center.
Áine Duffy, M.Sc. Associate Bioinformatician from 2017 – 2019 Now Ph.D. student in Genetics and Data Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Kumardeep Chaudhary, Ph.D Postdoctoral fellow from 2018 – 2021 Now Assistant Professor at Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research, India
Shantanu Bafna, M.Sc. Associate Bioinformatician from 2019 – 2022 Now Biostatistician, Sanofi, New Jersey
Soyeon Kim, B.S. Visiting Ph.D. student from 2021-2022 Now Ph.D. student at SAIHST, SKKU
Carla Marquez-Luna, Ph.D Postdoctoral fellow from 2019 – 2022 Now Statistical Geneticist at Invitae