Principal Investigator

Jackie Lee “JL” Ahn Weissman (they/she)

Assistant Professor, Department of Ecology & Evolution and the Institute for Advanced Computational Science (IACS)

Email: jackie.weissman@stonybrook.edu

Bio: JL Ahn Weissman (they/she) is an Assistant Professor at Stony Brook University in the Department of Ecology and Evolution and at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science. Her research examines how microbes survive and thrive across diverse environments.

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JL develops new tools to infer what microbes are doing and can do from DNA sequences captured directly from the environment (“metagenomes”), aiming to improve the representation of microbially-mediated biogeochemical cycles in global climate models. She also has a special interest in using a combination of comparative genomics, population genetics, and mathematical models to understand the ancient and ongoing battle between microbes and their viruses. She believes all students, with supportive training and mentorship, can become highly-capable computational biologists, and loves to show students how a little coding can go a long way.

Previously, JL served as the inaugural Director for Proposal Development at the City College of New York, where they managed large, interdisciplinary efforts to bring center-level funding to the college and trained early-career researchers in grantmaking. They maintain research affiliations in biology at CCNY and the University of Southern California and have taught at The Cooper Union School of Art. Before returning to New York, they were faculty at Chapman University, where they ran a computational biology research lab, taught, and developed initiatives to improve mentorship at the college level.

Postdoctoral Researchers

We are currently hiring two postdocs to work on on projects around microbial trait prediction and dynamical modeling of the human microbiome. You can find out more about the positions here

Graduate Students

M. Salim Dason

Email: mohammedsalim.dason@stonybrook.edu

Google Scholar

ORCID

GitHub

Bio: Salim is a PhD Student in Ecology & Evolution. His research interests include metagenomics, microbial community assembly, computational modeling, and microbial metabolism.

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Salim earned his bachelor’s degree in Life Sciences with a focus on microbial biotechnology in Morocco, then completed a master’s in Medical Biotechnologies in Italy. His thesis focused on identifying clade-specific microbial markers in shotgun metagenomic data from transgenic Alzheimer’s disease mouse models to profile and better understand shifts in gut microbiome composition linked to neurodegeneration.

After graduating, Salim worked as a bioinformatics research fellow on a project to develop a computational pipeline for the de novo reconstruction and functional annotation of metagenome-assembled genomes from gut microbiome data, with a particular focus on previously uncharacterized bacteria.

Lyra Lu

Email: lyra.lu@stonybrook.edu

Bio: Lyra is a PhD Student in Ecology & Evolution. She is interested in using comparative genomics and mathematical models to understand microbial systems.

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Lyra received their B.S. in Biology at Binghamton University before joining the mGamut Lab.

Postbac Researchers

Vivian Chavez (she/they)

Bio: Vivian is a C-CoMP Bridge-to-PhD fellow based in the mGAMUT Lab. Her research interests involve marine phytoplankton and their influence on the oceanic carbon cycle.

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Vivian received her B.S. in Interdisciplinary Environmental Science at Lehman College, with a focus on environmental biology and a minor in Studio Art. She is excited to translate her background in bacteria culturing into a computational research setting.

Undergraduates

Naqiya Moore

Bio: Naqiya is an undergraduate Applied Mathematics and Statistics major at Stony Brook University and a Simons STEM Scholar. She is interested in using statistical models to analyze viral genomes.