The Scientific Director of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Microbiome Analysis Core is Curtis Huttenhower, an Associate Professor of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health, as well as an Associate Member at the Broad Institute. His work focuses on computational methods development to understand the molecular functionality of the human microbiome, and his lab was a key participant in the NIH Human Microbiome Project. He currently co-leads the “HMP2” U54 Center for Characterizing the Gut Microbial Ecosystem for Diagnosis and Therapy in Inflammatory Bowel Disease, a multi-site initiative to follow up on the HMP with longitudinal, multi’omic analysis of the gut microbiome during IBD.
Jeremy E. Wilkinson is a Research Scientist in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and is the director of the Microbiome Analysis Core. He came to the School from RTLGenomics (formerly Research and Testing Laboratory), a privately-owned next generation sequencing laboratory that specializes in microbiome diversity sequencing and analysis, where he worked for 6 years and was the Director of Operations and Senior Biostatistician. Jeremy has a Ph.D. in Environmental Toxicology with a specific focus on microbiome analysis from Texas Tech University, a M.S. in Zoology with a specific focus on phylogenetics and population genetics from Oklahoma State University, and a B.S. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology with a minor in Microbiology from Oklahoma State University.
Lauren McIver is a senior software developer in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the software team lead in the Microbiome Analysis Core. Lauren has 16 years of experience in software development in a research environment of which the last 9 years have been in the area of bioinformatics. Her work in bioinformatics has covered many different domains including text mining, drug discovery, developing efficient algorithms to process “big data” for analysis of cancer mutations in human genomes, high performance computing in the life sciences, and pathogen forensics. Lauren has a BS in Computer Science and a MS in Applied Mathematics from The University of New Mexico.
Kelsey Thompson is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and an analyst with the Microbiome Analysis Core. Kelsey has a Ph.D. in Environmental Toxicology from Texas Tech University and a B.S. in Marine Science from the University of New England. During her dissertation research she focused on microbial community analysis. She also has experience working in the fields of DNA repair mechanisms, neoplastic transformation and marine mammal ecology.
Cherry (Chengchen) Li is a Research Project Manager in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a data analyst with the Microbiome Analysis Core. Cherry has a M.P.H. in Epidemiology with the Genetic and Molecular Epidemiology certificate from Emory University, where she focused on epigenetic age acceleration, genome-wide association studies, and data analysis in nutritional epidemiology. She has a B.A. in Biology with a focus on genetics from The University of Iowa.