PhD Student: Ian Smith

Ian received his Bachelors of Science in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, USA. After university, his interests switched to machine learning and bioinformatics. He worked as a computational biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard with a primary focus on analysis of high-throughput gene expression data from the L1000 assay in the Connectivity Map as part of the LINCS Consortium. Most of his work has pertained to the analysis of transcriptional data from genetic perturbations, especially RNAi and CRISPR data. As part of a collaboration with the Genomic Perturbations Platform of the Broad, he constructed predictive models to maximize the efficacy and minimize the off-target effects of sgRNAs for CRISPR-Cas9. His research interests include construction of gene networks from high-throughput biological data, integration of different assay technologies, modeling of drug treatment and combination therapy, and statistical methods to properly analyze and normalize high throughput transcriptomic data.