The W. Evan Johnson Lab
Meet Our Team
We are a strong and diverse team in the Genomic Data Science space. Each member of our team brings a unique set of skills and expertise to the table, allowing us to tackle complex research questions with confidence and precision. Meet some of our team members below:
Principal Investigator
W. Evan Johnson, Ph.D.
Evan is a Professor of Medicine and the Director of the Center for Data Science at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School.
Reasearch Scientist
Ethel Nankya, MD, MSc, DTM&H, Ph.D.
Ethel is a Bioinformatician and medical doctor specializing in cancer and infectious disease research.
Research Scientist
Howard Fan, Ph.D.
Howard is an expert in microbiome data analysis, especially batch effect correction. He is also working in TB sequence analysis.
Postdoctoral Research Scientist
Kiloni Quiles, Ph.D.
Kiloni is a postdoctoral research scientist at Boston University studying interactions between Vitamin A and the microbiome.
Postdoctoral Research Scientist
Xutao Wang, Ph.D.
Xutao is a postdoctoral research scientist at Boston University. She obtained her Ph.D. in Biostatistics from Boston University, B.S. in Statistics and Molecular Biology from the University of Toronto and M.S. in Computational Biology from Harvard University. Xutao’s research focuses on the development and validation of tuberculosis transcriptomic biomarkers and building ensemble models for heterogeneous data.
T32 Postdoctoral Fellow
Aubrey Odom, Ph.D.
Aubrey is a T32 postdoctoral trainee studying the epidemiology of atrial fibrillation at Boston University School of Medicine under Emelia Benjamin, Evan Johnson, and Honghuang Lin. She has worked with the Johnson Lab since 2019. She specializes in tools for processing and analyzing metagenomic and longitudinal microbiome data. She currently serves as the lab guru for the TBSignatureProfiler, MetaScope and LegATo R packages. She enjoys photography and indie rock concerts when she puts down her laptop sometimes.
Supervising Research Scientist
Arthur VanValkenburg, Ph.D.
Malnourished individuals with latent TB infections have more inflammation and enrichment of TB risk signatures designed to predict progression to active TB, highlighting the importance of malnutrition for controlling TB infection.
Informatics Scientist
Jessica McClintock
Jessica is currently developing BatchQC v2.0, an R shiny program that aids in analyzing batch effects in sequencing and microarray data. She also maintains the animalcules R package, which is an interactive microbiome analysis toolkit. She previously aided in the analysis and publication of an RSV postmortem microbiome analysis. When she isn’t working, she enjoys skiing, rock climbing, good food, and game nights with friends and family.
Ph.D. Student
Jianlan Ren
Jianlan is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. She is working on batch effect methods for scRNA-seq datasets.
Ph.D. Student
Nisreen Khambati
Nisreen is a pediatric doctor in the UK and is doing a PhD at the University of Oxford on TB diagnostics in children. Her research is on the host immune response in nasal cells in children and adults with TB disease, to understand underlying biological pathways and to identify nasal diagnostic biomarkers for TB.
Scientific Programmer
Solomon Joseph
Solomon is a scientific programmer in the Johnson Lab. He is an expert in computer science and cybersecurity.
M.D.-Ph.D. Student
Sean Lu
Sean is an MD-PhD student at Rutgers University. His work focuses on microbiome-host interactions in cancer and infectious disease.