N. Borlaug, Olga Nikolova et.al. CIMMYT 2005
About me:

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.

Research interests:

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.

Contact:

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