Our Team
Principal Investigator
Joseph D. Romano, PhD, MPhil, MA, FAMIA
Assistant Professor of Informatics and Pharmacology
Dr. Romano is a translational bioinformatician with expertise in AI and machine learning, biomedical knowledge representation, multimodal data integration, and environmental toxicology. He earned PhD, MPhil, and MA degrees in Biomedical Informatics from Columbia University before completing a postdoctoral fellowship in the lab of Jason Moore. At Penn, he serves as Associate Director of Biomedical Informatics Education, Associate Director of the Environmental Health Informatics Core, and a Senior Fellow in the Institute for Biomedical Informatics.
Postdoctoral Researchers
Rachit Kumar, PhD
Dr. Kumar is a medical student in the Penn Medical Scientist Training Program and a recent PhD graduate from the Graduate Group in Genomics and Computational Biology. His research focuses on developing new methods in protein and drug representation learning to improve the detection of new therapies for human disease.
Graduate Students
Chloé Paris
PhD Candidate in Genomics and Computational Biology
Research focus: Environmental epidemiology, hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, machine learning.
Oresta Hewryk
PhD Candidate in Biology
Research focus: Phytotherapies, biomedical ontologies, machine learning.
Tram Anh Nguyễn
PhD Candidate in Genomics and Computational Biology
Research focus: Multimodal data integration, graph machine learning, uterine fibroids.
Wendy Su
PhD Candidate in Genomics and Computational Biology
Research focus: Endometriosis, Omics-based risk prediction, natural language processing.
Ananya Rajagopalan
PhD Student in Genomics and Computational Biology (co-advised by Shefali Setia-Verma)
Research focus: Maternal health, integrating clinical and genetic data, machine learning.
Nia Abdurezak
PhD Student in Genomics and Computational Biology
Research focus: Informatics of autoimmune disease, drug adverse events, machine learning.
Heran Russom
PhD Rotation Student in Genomics and Computational Biology
Research focus: Graph representation learning, clinical informatics.
Andrew Zolensky
PhD Student in Genomics and Computational Biology
Research focus: Graph representation learning, clinical informatics.