Dr. Halie Rando is an informatician who is interested in identifying new opportunities to use computer science and data science to critically examine our approach to biomedical research. Right now, she is particularly interested in non-traditional animal models and veterinary medicine. Dr. Rando received her PhD in Informatics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2019, where she worked with Dr. Anna Kukekova to develop a bioinformatic perspective on the famous Russian Farm Fox Experiment, where foxes have been bred since the 1950s to show extreme behaviors, including tame, dog-like behavior. In 2020, she joined Dr. Casey Greene’s biological data science lab at the University of Pennsylvania and later the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. In Dr. Greene’s lab, Halie focused on adapating Manubot (software for collaborative writing) to support fast-moving projects related to COVID-19 and on evaluating the similarities and differences between various direct-to-consumer dog genetic tests. At Smith, she is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, where she teaches Data Structures (CSC 210) as well as upper-level coursework in databases (CSC 230) and health AI (CSC344bd).
Our lab gave several presentations at CCSC-NE, which was held this year here at Smith.
Four student research teams submitted abstract to Intelligent Systems in Molecular Biology, one of the major computational biology conferences, which will be held in Washington D.C. in July.
Exciting news: the lab had two abstracts accepted at the third annual Symposium on AI in Veterinary Medicine (SAVY3.0), which will be held at Cornell University in May.
We are excited to share that Alina Yildirim has been selected as an Honors Fellow through the AEMES McKinley Fellowship Program!
Today Hildana Shiferaw gave an excellent presentation of her honors thesis on a urine-based screening approach for ovarian cancer!
Rising seniors Hildana Shiferaw and Tseegi Nyamdorj presented lightning talks at Computational Systems for Integrative Genomics at the Flatiron Institute in NYC!
We are excited to share that Hildana Shiferaw has been selected as an Honors Fellow through the AEMES McKinley Fellowship Program!