I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at Iowa State University. My advisors are Dr. Srinivas Aluru and Dr. Patrick Schnable (co-major). I joined Dr. Aluru's Scientific Computing group in August 2007 and will be graduating this summer.

My primary research interests lie in the intersection of computational systems biology, parallel algorithms, and machine learning. Specifically, my thesis focuses on parallel algorithms for Bayesian network structure learning, which I apply to gene expression data to model small and large-scale (whole-genome) gene networks in model plant organisms like Arabidopsis and (soon) maize.

I am also very interested in applications of probabilistic models to the biomedical domain. I gained some experience in this area during my internship with Chris Bishop and his fantastic team at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. While there, I investigated automated modeling of causal effects in an early-life environmental intervention study in childhood asthma and allergies (Manchester Asthma and Allergy Study). I used Infer.NET. I also did some preliminary work in a genome-wide association study for genetic-environmental interactions.

Durham Center 348
Iowa State University
Ames, IA 50011
515-294-3811
olia at iastate dot edu