Academic Staff

David is a Senior Computational Biologist in Ashley lab. After earning a BSc in Biology and MSc in Computational Biology in Spain, he moved to Chicago where he obtained a Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from the University of Illinois. During his graduate work, he studied a variety of physicochemical and functional constraints acting on the sequence and structure of proteins. For example, he characterized the evolutionary patterns in a membrane protein family and applied this information to successfully engineer altered versions of a protein of this family. He also explored physicochemical properties of the functional cavities of enzymes, proposed new metrics, and characterized defining features of these important functional spaces.

Perhaps most significantly, he unveiled the distinctive nature of lysine carboxylation, a non-enzymatic posttranslational modification affecting active sites. The growing necessity of his research to better understand how biological data is collected, stored and managed led him to the dictyBase (Northwestern University), where he had the opportunity to learn the methodology of professional software development and database management to advance his computational skills. During this time, he re-designed and implemented the new user interface of dictyBase and was involved in a major database overhaul.

After that, he moved to San Francisco as computational leader in Krogan lab (UCSF), where he worked on the development of innovative approaches for the analysis and integration of large-scale datasets as part of multiple research projects and collaborations all over the country on many different scientific areas including host-pathogen interactions, cancer, diabetes, obesity, and neurodegenerative diseases.

Dr Marwaha is a Research Engineer in the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine. She received her PhD in Systems Biology and Physiology from University of Cincinnati in 2015 and since 2016 has been working as a Bioinformatician with Stanford Center on diagnosis of rare diseases . Her primary role involves analysis and management of genomics and immunology data. She focuses on benchmarking variant callers, optimizing tools for variant prioritization and analysis of single cell immune data.