Nick Celms

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Nick Celms has been part of the Edwards lab since the Summer of 2008, and works on visualizations of BLAST comparisons. He spent his first two years as an undergraduate at the University of Washington before transferring to San Diego State’s computer science department. Nick is one of SDSU’s first wave of cross-trained students participating in the BioMath program, an emerging NSF priority. Outside the lab, Nick is the Vice President of a student organization called Compassion for African Villages that sends aide to the village of Rundongo, Zimbabwe.

Carny Cheng

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Carny is a Computational Science Masters student. His research focuses mainly on web services providing middleware for scientists to access cyberinfrastructure resources. Carny holds two Bachelors degrees from University of California, San Diego in Computer Engineering and economics. He has spent sometime working in the software industry at Websense, Inc. where he bounced from project to project eventually settling in text classification.

Carny also serves as the lab system administrator. It is advisable to stay on Carny’s good-side if you want your access to the lab’s computing resources.

Kate McNair

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Kate is a …

staff needed?

Matt Hagen

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Josh Hoffman

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Josh is a Computer Science student pursuing a Bachelor of Science degree at San Diego State. He is currently writing utilities which extract various information from Blast outputs. His most recent project involves finding Bidirectional Best Hits in a given Blast output.

Vasken Kamiksisian

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Vasken Kamiksisian is an SDSU Computer Science student working to create OpenSocial applications and gadgets relating to the lab research. Users of these applications will be able to pull information from servers all over the globe. In addition to quickly retrieving information, users will be able to use the tools located on these remote servers. All users need to do is add the gadgets to their respective account (i.e. iGoogle, Orkut, Facebook, etc.).

Here is a google gadget that searches information on the lab’s servers. Bioinformatics Search

Matt Seitz

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Matt is a Computer Science undergraduate who is currently in his final semester at SDSU. He started working with the lab in the Spring ’09 semester.

His current work is to develop Open Social applications that can help the lab quickly pull data or use tools located on remote servers. By integrating the Open Social framework, these applications will be portable. This allows them to be easily integrated across many different platforms.

See Vasken’s bio for a link to a text search that can be added to your Google, MySpace, Orkut, or other valid Open Social supporting account.

Sajia Akhter

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Sajia is a Ph.D. student in the computational science research center (CSRC) at SDSU. She joined Edwards Lab in Fall, 2007. Before coming to SDSU, she completed her B.Sc. in American International University-Bangladesh.

Sajia conducts her research on assembly of short-read sequencing data. Especially she looks for more time and memory efficient variations of existing assembly algorithms. Apart from that she also worked on applying information theory on metagenomes and microbial genomes. She found that information theory can be effectively applied on finding informative sequences.

Robert Schmieder

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bla bla blub

Victor Seguritan

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I am Victor ….

Ramy K. Aziz

Ramy is faculty member in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Faculty of Pharmacy, Cairo University. He is currently a member of the National Microbial Pathogen Data Resource (NMPDR, [1]) affiliated with the University of Chicago and the Argonne National Lab, IL. Since the Edwards lab is a major contributor to NMPDR tools, Ramy is working in this lab at San Diego State University (SDSU), enjoying the warmer San Diego weather and learning the computational side of computational biology. His project is to improve the annotations of phage genomes and microbial pathogens.
Ramy received a Bachelors degree in Pharmacy at Cairo University in 1995, and received his PhD in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Tennessee, Health Science Center (Memphis, TN) in 2004. He then served as Postdoc at University of Tennessee, Health Science Center. Before arriving at University of Tennessee, Health Science Center, Ramy served as Graduate Teaching Assistat at Faculty of Pharmacy, Cairo University.
Ramy’s research interests includes microbial pathogenesis, immunogenetics and host-pathogen interactions, virulence factor discovery and evolution of virulence especially via bacteriophage, bioinformatics/computational biology and (micro)biology education.

Rob Edwards