Sebastian Pott
Assistant Professor
Email: spott@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
Ayelen Lizarraga
Postdoctoral Researcher
Ayelen is a postdoctoral researcher from Argentina.She’s interested in combining wet lab and novel computational approaches to study the interplay between different epigenetic mechanisms, and their impact on human health. Her research involves using a long-read multi-omics approach to understandhow epigenetic memory in adult stem cells is established and maintained in response to different stimuli.
Email: lizarraga@uchicago.edu
Yiheng Peng
Postdoctoral Researcher
Yiheng received his Ph.D. in Comparative Biosciences from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before joining Sebastian’s group at the University of Chicago as a postdoctoral researcher. His work combines high-throughput sequencing with computational techniques to deepen our understanding of genomic regulation and cellular dynamics.
Email: yihengp@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
Kathleen (Katie) Dreyer
Postdoctoral Scholar
Katie is a postdoctoral scholar jointly advised by Dr. Ivan Moskowitz. She received her PhD in Chemical Engineering from Northwestern University, where her research focused on computational biology for mammalian synthetic biology applications. Her current research involves utilizing bioinformatic and systems biology approaches to elucidate gene regulatory mechanisms underlying cardiac morphogenesis and function.
Email: kdreyer@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
2024-12-19 Christmas lunch
2025-02-03 Ethan’s defense
Previous members
Yu Zhao, PhD (2022-2025).
Conrad Triebold, Staff Scientist (2023-2024).
Dylan Jockel, Research Technician (2022-2024). Following position: Lab Technician/Manager at UChicago in Shubin lab.
Laura DeVries, Research technician (2021-2023). Following position: Medical student at Michigan State University.
Michael Wasney, Research technician (2019-2021). Following position: Graduate Student at UCLA in the Garud lab.
Florian Wagner, Postdoctoral scholar (2019-2021). Following position: computational biologist at 10x Genomics.