New Directors for ground-breaking Masters program in Automated Science

We are very pleased that Dr. Jose Lugo-Martinez has returned to the Computational Biology Department as an Assistant Professor. He received his B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Puerto Rico - Rio Piedras (UPR-RP), and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Indiana University.  He was previously a Lane Fellow in the Computational Biology Department where he drew on his expertise in graph inference methods to develop novel approaches for modeling longitudinal microbiome data and for predictive modeling of protein complexes. He joins us after serving as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at UPR-RP.  His future research aims to develop and implement the next generation of computational approaches to accelerate biomedical research through automated and autonomous science.  In line with this, he will be taking over as Director of our Masters program in Automated Science from former Department Head and Professor Emeritus Robert F. Murphy, who created the program.

Assistant Teaching Professor Joshua Kangas, who is currently Associate Director, will also become Director of the program. He did pioneering work on closed loop, automated analysis of diverse drug effects during his studies in our Joint Ph.D. Program in Computational Biology.  He developed and teaches the two-semester course on designing and running automated science experiments using laboratory automation that is at the heart of the program.