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.

Maléne is an Academic Senior Researcher in cardiovascular medicine and manages the Human Molecular Moonshot of the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance at Stanford, as well as the Bioinformatics Center for the Molecular Transducers of Physical Activity Consortium (MoTrPAC). She is from Stockholm, Sweden, where she completed her combined bachelor and master’s degree in Biomedicine (2007) at the Karolinska Institute.

She earned her PhD in Medicine (2015) from the Karolinska Institute for her work on endurance training adaptation of skeletal muscle in humans. During her PhD, she investigated the epigenomic and transcriptomic response to training, and the effect of repeated training on skeletal muscle adaptation, or “muscle memory”. She was awarded a Wallenberg fellowship to fund her postdoctoral research in the Ashley lab, which focused on the multi-omic effects of exercise through MoTrPAC, and how protein-truncating variants alpha-actinin 2 cause cardiomyopathy in humans.

She has a particular scientific interest in the molecular and genomic aspects of training adaptation and human performance for precision health, primarily in the prevention of cardiovascular diseases. Outside work, she likes to travel with her family and enjoy the California weather through exercising, hiking, surfing and the occasional wine tasting.

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.