Clint joined the University of Virginia in the summer of 2017 as Assistant Professor in the Department of Genome Science (formerly Center for Public Health Genomics). He was previously an Instructor at Stanford University in Cardiovascular Medicine. Dr. Miller earned his PhD in Pharmacology at the University of Rochester and was a postdoctoral fellow in Human Genetics at Stanford University in the laboratory of Tom Quertermous. There he investigated the causal regulatory mechanisms of coronary artery disease loci by profiling primary human vascular cells and tissues. He is also a member of the Data Science Institute, Robert Berne Cardiovascular Research Institute, and has secondary appointments in Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics and Biomedical Engineering.

Sander is an assistant professor at the Central Diagnostics Laboratory which is part of the Circulatory Health Program at the University Medical Center Utrecht and University of Utrecht and visiting professor at the University of Virginia. His research interest is focused on the genetic and epigenetic causes of carotid and coronary atherosclerosis underlying ischemic stroke (IS) and coronary artery disease (CAD), and their intermediate traits such as carotid intima media thickness (cIMT) and arterial calcification.

Gaëlle received her PhD in Molecular and Cellular Physiopathology at the Paris-Sud University in France before joining the Center for Cardiovascular Genetics directed by Dr Marian at The University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston as postdoctoral fellow. Her previous work focused on the molecular mechanisms involved in the cardiac phenotype in laminopathies. She is interested in understanding genetic and molecular mechanisms underlying cardiovascular diseases using multi-omics approaches.

Minghong received her MD in clinical medicine and worked as a physician in China. Her previous research focused on vasculature formation, tissue regeneration, and the mechanisms of hypertension. She is interested in understanding the pathophysiology of cardiovascular diseases at molecular, genetic, and clinical levels, aiming to translate basic research findings into improved therapeutic strategies for patients.

Dr. Sheng’en Shawn Hu is a research scientist who joined UVA in November 2017 under the mentorship of Dr. Chongzhi Zang in CPHG. Previously he completed his PhD training in bioinformatics from School of Life Science and Technology, Tongji University in China, and was a visiting student at Harvard University. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship in the Zang lab on developing computational methodologies to integrate high-throughput chromatin accessibility data and study functional gene regulation. He works with the Miller lab to apply these methods to understand regulatory mechanisms of cardiovascular disease risk.

Maria is an AstraZeneca Fellowship Postdoctoral Researcher in the Miller Lab. She received her PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics from UVA, where, as part of the iPRIME initiative, she investigated the immunological aspects of Cardiovascular Disease using computational tools. Maria is interested in leveraging novel bioinformatics methods on multi-modal single-cell data to uncover new biomarkers of CVD.

Yipei completed her Master’s in Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Virginia where she helped design and develop “Mitogenie", an end-to-end data science online platform for biologists and clinicians to decipher hidden patterns in their data and generate insights into disease. She is currently enrolled in the Computer Engineering PhD program at UVA and is interested in applying (deep) machine learning methods for understanding the complex relationships between genes and phenotypes for cardiovascular diseases.

Jose is a Biomedical Sciences PhD Student in the Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics program and he joined the Miller lab early 2021. He previously worked at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center during his undergraduate studies at the University of Washington, where he investigated the role of nuclear lipid droplets in damage repair mechanisms relevant to various complex diseases. He is currently co-mentored by the Sheffield Lab and is focused on applying integrative single-cell and spatial genomics computational approaches to unravel the regulatory logic of vascular cell transition states during atherosclerosis.

Shay is a Biomedical Sciences PhD student in the Cell Biology program and joined the Miller lab in 2023. They received their BA in Biological Sciences and Statistical Data Sciences from Smith College, where they worked in Dr. Michael Barresi’s lab at Smith studying zebrafish forebrain development. Subsequently, they conducted a remote undergraduate senior honors thesis with Dr. Gloria Sheynkman at the University of Virginia, creating a pipeline to map short-read alternative splicing data to long-read isoform transcripts. Shay’s research interests lie at the intersection of systems biology, multi-omics analysis, functional genomics, and accessible scientific communication. Outside the lab, they are an executive member of UVA’s Queer in Medical Sciences group, a member of the First Harmonics a cappella group at UVA, and an aspiring home chef.

John is a Biomedical Sciences PhD Student in the Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics program. He previously conducted post-baccalaureate research in molecular biology, cancer, and neuroscience at two different institutions of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), also during his undergraduate studies at American University. He has established an array of computational biology and bioinformatics expertise and is currently co-mentored by the Sheffield Lab. His primary focus is applying computational genomics and machine learning methods to classify atherosclerotic coronary disease subtypes and candidate targets by leveraging epigenomic and histology imaging datasets.

Patrick Hart is an MSTP student, class of 2031, from the Charlottesville area who attended UVA for his undergraduate education in Chemistry. Patrick is interested in using multi-omics analysis to investigate the pathogenesis of cardiometabolic disease and has previous experience in applying proteomics to study exercise. In his free time he enjoys lifting weights, running, cooking, and trying all the best coffee shops in Charlottesville.

Adam is a graduate student at the University of Virginia (MPH ’24). In the lab, he works on the generation and validation of CRISPR-based perturbation on smooth muscle cells. Outside the lab, Adam is an EMT with the Charlottesville Albemarle Rescue Squad and works with Seven Directions Indigenous Public Health Institute. In his spare time, Adam enjoys hiking and spending time with his dog, Axel.

Ivory is a fourth year undergraduate (Class of 2025) majoring in Mathematics and minoring in Computer Science on the pre-health track. In the lab, she is aiding in single-cell RNA and single-cell ATAC sequencing data analysis to help build the atherosclerosis cell atlas. She is involved in Madison House as a student volunteer and leader, tutors high school and college students, and works as a medical assistant in the UVA Hospital. In her free time, she loves to read, bake, and spend time with her cat.

Aditi is an undergraduate student (Class of 2025) majoring in biology and applied statistics. In the lab, she is currently analyzing scRNA seq libraries in order to create an atlas of human atherosclerotic data. Outside of the lab, she is also involved in Madison House and Remote Area Medical.

Arjuna is an undergraduate student (class of 2026) majoring in computer science with a minor in data science. After graduation, he plans on pursuing a graduate degree in data analytics. He joined the lab in fall of 2023. Within the lab, he is working on analyzing links between genotype and cardiovascular disease phenotype using machine learning. Outside the lab, he is currently involved in ICPC and enjoys cooking and playing basketball.

Christine Tsai is a fourth-year undergraduate student majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Data Science. She is interested in machine learning and harnessing the tools of computer science to solve real-life challenges, and in her free time, she enjoys bouldering and baking

Ashrita is a 4th year undergraduate student at UVA. She is a statistics major and data science minor. In her free time, she enjoys baking, reading, and drawing.

Katherine Shillito is a third year undergraduate student majoring in biology with a minor in data science. She joined the Miller lab in the fall of 2024 and is interested in using computational tools to further understand the biological systems underlying cardiovascular disease. At UVA, she is a volunteer with Madison House in the pediatrics department and is a member of the University Dance Club.

Chani is now a senior research scientist at Ionis Pharmaceuticals.
Chani was a Postdoctoral Fellow from 2017 until 2023 in the Miller Lab where she combined molecular and computational techniques to elucidate mechanisms by which genetic variation in regulatory regions
affects plaque formation in CAD.

Adam is now a project manager in Ryan Corces’s lab at the Gladstone Institutes. Adam was a postdoctoral Fellow in the Miller lab from 2017 to 2021 where he worked on the application of cutting-edge genomics and bioinformatics approaches to uncover novel mechanisms of non-lipid loci.
Adam received his PhD and MS in Biochemistry specializing in Human and Molecular Genetics at the University of Ottawa where he trained under the mentorship of Dr. Ruth McPherson whose group first discovered the 9p21 genetic risk locus for heart disease. His previous work has focused on understanding the functional mechanisms of multiple cardiometabolic risk loci.

Doris is now a computational genomics scientist at Vertex Pharmaceuticals. She got her PhD in Biomedical Sciences in 2022.
In the Miller Lab, she intersected functional genomics and targeted validation approaches to better understand and treat cardiovascular diseases.Doris received her Bachelor’s of Science degree in biochemistry from Boston College. Following graduation, she worked at Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Dr. Alan Engelman’s lab studying the role of host proteins in HIV integration.

Wei received his PhD in Experimental Pathology in 2022 and his now preparing for his medical residency. In the Miller Lab, Wei applied computational techniques to unravel disease-specific markers in CAD and beyond.
Wei earned his BA in Biology at Colby College in Maine. He trained at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health, before joining the UVA Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP). His previous work involved understanding the complex relationship between neuroinflammation and the gut-brain axis, and redox biology in the tumor microenvironment.
Wei is absolutely in love with Charlottesville and plans to become a fantastic physician scientist.

Rizwan Ullah joined the Miller lab late 2023 as a postdoctoral fellow until October 2024. He earned his PhD in Animal Biology from Aligarh University in India. Following his doctoral studies, he joined Vanderbilt University Medical Center as a postdoctoral fellow.

Nelson is a PhD candidate at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the McCallion lab.
He was research assistant/lab manager in the Miller lab from 2018 to 2021.
His projects involved determining the role of RNA splicing on complex vascular diseases and applying base editing approaches to study the function of genetic variants that affect the vasculature.

Ruben Methorst was a master’s student in Biomedical Sciences at Utrecht University in the Netherlands focusing on cardiovascular diseases. In the Miller lab, Ruben was working on in silico detection of clonality in coronary artery atherosclerosis by exerting both bulk and single cell -omics data. He previously worked on Mendelian randomization and functional assays at UMC Utrecht.

Daud is currently working as a genomics researcher in the lab of Dr. Nathan Salomonis at Cincinnati Childrens Medical Center. In the Miller lab, he was primarily responsible for generating novel coronary artery transcriptomics datasets and computational pipelines and doubled as laboratory manager.

Cristie (Xingyu) Liu was an undergraduate student (Class of 2024), majoring in Biology. She joined the lab in the fall of 2022 up to her graduation in 2024, where she worked on the validation of CAD associated candidate variant using CRISPR-based perturbation on smooth muscle cells.

Vineel is a Third-year undergraduate student (Class of 2026) majoring in Computer Science with a minor in Religious Studies. He joined the lab in the fall of 2023. In his free time, he enjoys playing tennis, rock climbing, and reading.

Yixuan was an undergraduate student majoring in Biology and Statistics, class of 2023. She worked in the Miller lab from 2020 until 2023 where she conducted computational projects on CAD associated genes and helped perform tissue culture and RNA sequencing experiments.

Priya was an undergraduate student majoring in Global Public Health at UVA. She joined the lab in the fall of 2020 until 2022 and worked on analyzing coronary artery disease gene expression datasets using R.

Humaira was an undergraduate student (Class of 2022) double majoring in Medical Anthropology and Biostatistics with a minor in Studio Arts. In the lab, she worked on the integration of chromatin associations for CAD with large-scale publicly available epigenomics data.

Jasmine Dogu was an undergraduate student (Class of 2022) from Fairfax, VA double majoring in Statistics and Computer Science with a minor in Data Science. Jasmine joined the lab in the fall of 2020 where she is analyzing coronary artery disease gene expression datasets using R.

Saranya Kasinathuni was an undergraduate student majoring in Global Public Health on the pre-health track. In the Miller lab, she was working on a segmentation task to investigate the relationship between cholesterol crystals and plaque stability as dependent on the severity of different vascular events.

Meredith is currently enrolled in the Master of Health Science (MHS) in Epidemiology program at The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She previously joined the lab as a third-year undergraduate student majoring in Biology and Global Public Health. Her project involved evaluating histological and cell-specific features of normal and diseased coronary artery specimens.

Arfa was an undergraduate (Class of 2022) majoring in Biostatistics on the Pre-health track planning to attend medical school post-graduation. In the Miller lab, she worked on integrating CAD chromatin accessibility data with large-scale publicly available datasets.

Sejal was an undergraduate student majoring in Statistics with a concentration in Biostatistics. In the Miller lab, she conducted both computational and molecular techniques to characterize the function of CAD associated genes.

Pranavi is an undergraduate student (Class of 2022) from Herndon, VA double majoring in Cognitive Science with a concentration in Computer Science and Spanish. She joined the lab in the fall of 2020 where she worked on the analysis of coronary artery disease gene expression datasets using R.

Tuan is currently attending the Edward Via Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine (VCOM) at Virginia Tech. He previously joined the lab as a fourth year undergraduate student majoring in Biomedical Engineering. Tuan’s project involved performing targeted CRISPR/dCas9 based perturbation of candidate regulatory variants of CAD to validate their effects on gene expression in smooth muscle cells under different phenotypic states.

David was an undergraduate student (Class of 2021) from Richmond, VA majoring in Biomedical Engineering with a minor in Computer Science. He joined the lab in the Fall of 2020 and was analyzing RNA splicing data and its association with vascular disease.

Eva is currently enrolled in the class of 2024 Doctor of Dental Surgery (DDS) program at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). She previously joined the lab as a fourth-year undergraduate student majoring in Biology and minoring in Sociology. In the lab she studied novel CAD genes through both in vitro functional assays and RNA sequencing experiments.

Caitlin Dreisbach, PhD, RN is currently an assistant professor at the at the University of Rochester School of Nursing with an affiliation in the Goergen Institute for Data Science. Her research focus is on the use of quantitative methods to make better clinical assessments during pregnancy. Further, she is interested in the health of women over the course of their lifetime. This includes how conditions during the periconceptual and pregnancy periods impact short and long-term health. Cait received her PhD and Master’s in Data Science from the University of Virginia, her Bachelor’s in Nursing from The Johns Hopkins University, and a Bachelor’s of Science from Cornell University.

Vivek is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in the Division of Molecular and Cellular Pathology. He completed his undergraduate studies in Bioinformatics from the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York, following which he joined the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston as a research technician. He completed his PhD in Pharmacology at the University of Rochester and postdoc at Stanford with Dr. Nicholas Leeper and worked with the Miller Lab on the mechanism of the LMOD1 GWAS locus in smooth muscle cells.

Tina is currently a Senior Scientist at Natera in the Bay Area and formerly worked at BD and Miroculus on the development of emerging genomics technologies. She received her Bachelor’s degree from The University of Sheffield, UK in Molecular Biology and Biotechnology and her PhD in Microbiology and Immunology from Indiana University. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the lab of Dr. Tom Quertermous at Stanford and joined Dr. Michael Snyder’s group in 2015. During her postdoc she was involved with the Miller lab and worked on multiple human functional genomics and host-microbiome projects and contributed to understanding the function of LMOD1 in smooth muscle cells.