alumni Spotlight

Christopher Poirel

Christopher Poirel received the B.S. degree in mathematics (computer science minor) from the University of South Carolina Honors College, Columbia, and the Ph.D. in computer science at Virginia... Read More

Christopher D Lasher

Genetics, Bioinformatics, and Computational Biology
  • Program: Genetics, Bioinformatics, and Computational Biology
  • College: Graduate School
  • Degree Received: Ph.D.
  • Personal Webpage: http://www.gotgenes.com/
  • Year Recruited: 2007
  • Year Graduated: 2012
  • Advisor(s): T. M. Murali, Padma Rajagopalan
  • Thesis Title: Discovering contextual connections between biological processes using high-throughput data

About

I received my bachelors degree in biology from the University of Georgia, where I continued to work as a research technician, studying the bacterial community composition of the salt marshes of Georgia's coast. Continuing my academic career, I joined the Genetics, Bioinformatics, and Computational Biology Ph.D. program at Virginia Tech. For my dissertation I applied and developed several methods to discover high-level trends in treatment-control studies. These methods integrated multiple sources of high-throughput biological data, including protein interaction networks, gene expression, and gene annotations. Following graduate school I held a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Center for Biotechnology Information where I investigated using epigenetic data to identify patterns in regulatory elements of the genome. Today I focus on software development in the space of life sciences software.

I work at 5AM Solutions, Inc. I work with biotechnology companies both large and small to develop robust software used internally to the companies and also used by their customers. Every day I work alongside life scientists, bioinformatics scientists, professional software developers, business analysts, and business managers. The skills I learned in CTE on communicating across disciplines and swiftly accumulating knowledge in new technologies have made me extremely successful in my career so far.