We are an interdisciplinary research group affiliated with the Department of Computer Science, the Department of Human Genetics and the Department of Computational Medicine at UCLA.
Our lab is broadly interested in questions at the intersection of computer science, statistics, and biomedicine. We develop statistical and computational methods to make sense of complex, high-dimensional datasets that are being generated in the fields of genomics and medicine to answer questions ranging from how humans have evolved to what are the biological underpinnings of diseases to how we can improve the diagnosis and treatment of diseases.
A major focus of our research is in understanding and interpreting our genomes. The biological questions we are interested in centers around understanding how evolution shapes our genes and how our genes modulate complex traits that include a number of common diseases. To pursue these questions, we develop and extend tools from a diverse set of disciplines including machine learning, algorithms, optimization, high-dimensional statistics, and information theory. We also apply these tools to high-dimensional genomic and medical datasets that are publicly available or being generated by our collaborators.
Some major research themes in our lab are:
We are looking for post-docs and Ph.D. students with strong computational and statistical backgrounds. Ph.D. students can join our lab through the Computer Science, Bioinformatics, or Genetics and Genomics graduate programs. Contact us if you are interested in any of these opportunities.
Design credit: Malika Kumar Freund
Dr. Sankararaman, has received a National Science Foundation CAREER award, the agency’s highest honor for faculty members at the start of their research and teaching careers. More info.
Ruth Johnson, a CS Ph.D. student in our LAB was the keynote speaker during the opening ceremony of Exploretech.la. Making computer science and technology more accessible to local high school students!
Arun Durvasula and Sriram's paper hit the news internationally! "Recovering signals of ghost archaic introgression in African populations"
Science Advances Article. NPR interview.
Dr. Sankararaman has been awarded a two-year fellowship from Microsoft Research.
Article in the news.
Award: Microsoft Investigator Fellowship
Our lab meets at the American Society of Human Genetics in Houston, TX and we got some awards back home! News and More Pictures
Ruthie gives a talk "A scalable Bayesian model for estimating the genetic architecture of complex traits using summary statistics from GWAS"
at the Probabilistic Modeling in Genomics 2018 conference at CSHL.
Ariel presents her poster on "Scalable estimation of heritability and genetic correlation for biobank-scale data" at ProbGen 2018.
Ariel give a talk: "A scalable estimator of SNP heritability for Biobank-scale data" at ISMB in Chicago!
Chris gives talk at the American Society of Human Genetics meeting in Orlando!
Paper from our lab on "The Combined Landscape of Denisovan and Neanderthal Ancestry in Present-Day Humans" published in Current Biology.
Press coverage: