Research @ Petri Dish
We support innovators looking to help fuel new research endeavors or contribute to open research projects.
To support our innovators, we created our format called the "Grand Project" to provide a structure for researchers to gain local support for their projects. Click here to find our format and email info@dmvpetridish.com if you're interested in starting one at Petri Dish!
Computational Biology Working Group
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Matt Zamora
Project Coordinator
Paul Zamora, PhD
Investigator
Michael Muchow, PhD
Investigator
Mission
Our mission is to support Neurofibromatosis research focused on finding therapeutics that can benefit cancers, and rare diseases like neurofibromatosis patients sooner rather than later. We do this by bringing together data scientists, bioinformaticians, and biologists together to create that combine knowledge of drug development processes with knowledge of bioinformatic and data processing systems.
Our secondary objectives for this project are to:
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Promote cross-collaboration between biosciences and tech professionals by working towards common goals
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Provide training opportunities for students and junior level researchers to gain additional research experience
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Provide an opportunity for career changers to get experience in working in a biotech environment
Lab website
Systems Biology Working Group
Sam Keating, MS
Principal Investigator
About
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As a Systems Biologist at heart, I prefer to specialize my biomedical research on interactions and connections in biology - rather than just one domain of expertise. I prefer to wear many hats and collect skill sets across disciplines, with degree studies and industry experience acquired across Chemical Engineering (BSc), Bioinformatics (MSc), Systems and Synthetic Biology (M2), Biomedical Sciences (MSc), and beyond. Even more important to me than niches or fields of work, comes down to the synergistic approaches that allow us to move beyond reductionism. The notion that a question can only allow for one answer, is inherently reductionist. By resisting many norms in science and engineering which can get overly reductive, my current role as Principal Investigator of Research for DMV Petri Dish (501(c)(3) non-profit local to the DMV region) embraces computational frameworks that aide scale-up and automation - not only around the processes which already exist with established workflows, but also taking a keen interest in attempting and accomplishing ambitions which have never been perceived to be possible previously. I carry a passion for the synergy of computational biology - fused with wet lab validation. This way, one can build a beautiful knowledge base in the theoretical sense, and then test to see if said computational prediction might actually be able to stand in the real world with wet lab validation. Translational modeling starts to become possible once biological experiment design can be iteratively looped alongside computational model design, optimization, and analysis - empowering the design of a better wet lab experiment, followed by a better computational model, back and forth until science is done!
Mission
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Advance ME/CFS research in a way that accounts for the incredible amount of complexity and heterogeneity in the data.
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To repurpose "old data" (datasets which have already previously been generated within existing ME/CFS research) to find new insights into the condition.
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To mine novel combinations of hypotheses and cohorts/datasets to find new discoveries and approaches to understanding ME/CFS.