Pott Lab

Sebastian Pott

Assistant Professor

Sebastian’s research centers around high-throughput genomics approaches for characterizing gene regulatory mechanisms in health and disease. He is interested in developing novel single-cell and single-molecule approaches and applying them to study systems and questions that are intractable with current methods.

Email: spott@uchicago.edu

 

 

 

 

 

Yiheng Peng

Postdoctoral Researcher

Yiheng received his Ph.D. in Comparative Biosciences from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He then joined Dr. Sebastian’s group at the University of Chicago as a postdoctoral researcher. His research focuses on studying the genetics of complex traits and trans-regulation of genes by developing and applying statistical methods to large-scale sequencing datasets. Through his work, Yiheng aims to gain key insights into the role of trans gene regulation in complex traits and improve the portability of polygenic scores.

Email: yihengp@uchicago.edu

Ethan is a graduate student in PME, jointly supervised by Gene Chang. His research focuses on solving clinical problems through analysis of next generation sequencing data (e.g. scATAC, scRNA, etc). He is passionate about combining interdisciplinary knowledge to provide new insights. He enjoys collaborating with scientists with different backgrounds and expertise.

Email: yuzhao1@uchicago.edu

Zhiwei Jiang

PhD Candidate

Zhiwei is a graduate student of Chemistry program, jointly supervised by Professor Mengjie Chen at Human genetics department. He has a mixed background in wet labs, bioinformatics and statistics. He is interested in using methods of bioinformatics and biostatistics to study biological systems. He is also a huge fan and enthusiastic practitioner of Olympic weight lifting.

Email: zwjiang@uchicago.com

Raven Moten

PhD Candidate

Raven is a graduate student in the Genetics, Genomics, and Systems Biology program. Broadly, she is interested in understanding the impact of dysregulated mechanisms of gene regulation in disease. Her research focuses on developing methods to characterize chromatin architecture and cellular identity. Raven enjoys karaoke and taking care of her plants.

Email: rwatson@uchicago.edu

Kevin (Kaixuan) Luo

Collaborator, Staff Scientist

Kevin (Kaixuan) Luo completed his PhD in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics from Duke University, supervised by Dr. Alex. Hartemink. Kevin then conducted postdoctoral research at U Chicago, jointly supervised by Dr. Xin He and Dr. Matthew Stephens. Kevin is interested in developing statistical and machine learning methods to better understand the mechanisms by which genetic variation impacts gene regulation and diseases.

Email: kaixuan@uchicago.edu

Diana Vera Cruz

Collaborator, Staff Scientist

Diana received her Ph.D. in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics from Duke University. Before joining the CRI Bioinformatics core, she was a research scientist in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago. Diana studied viral evolution across scales and how it is impacted by immune selection, antibody dynamics, and vaccination. Her expertise includes population genetics, phylogenetics, mathematical modeling, statistical methods, transcriptomics, sc-RNAseq, and pipeline development.

Email: dveracruz@bsd.uchicago.edu

Rishi Purayil

Undergraduate student

Rishi is an Air Force ROTC cadet pursuing his B.S. in Statistics at the University of Chicago. He enjoys running, spending time outdoors, and gardening. Rishi is currently investigating methylation between transcriptional regulators and transcription start sites to understand the accessibility of CpG-rich regions.
Email: rpurayil3@uchicago.edu

Group photos

Previous members

Conrad Triebold, Staff Scientist (2023-2024).

Dylan Jockel, Research Technician (2022-2024). Next position: Lab Technician/Manager at UChicago in Shubin lab.

Laura DeVries, Research technician (2021-2023). Next position: Medical student at Michigan State University.

Michael Wasney, Research technician (2019-2021). Next position: Graduate Student at UCLA in the Garud lab.

Florian Wagner, Postdoctoral scholar (2019-2021). Next position: computational biologist at 10x Genomics.