People

Mohadeseh (Madis) is a Bioengineering Ph.D. student who joined the lab in September 2023. She completed her B.Sc. in Microbiology from IAUTMU, focusing on in-silico drug design. Madis is currently engaged in network analysis, particularly studying networks related to neurodegenerative diseases, and she explores Protein-Protein Interactions (PPI), drugs, and disease pathways. In her spare time, she enjoys watching movies, cooking, hanging out with friends, and traveling.

Mohamad is a Ph.D. candidate in Bioengineering. He conducted research in computational fluid dynamics and applied machine learning methods to analyze medical data in the past. His current research interest includes developing in silico techniques to understand biological systems. He is working on increasing the detection of drugs’ side effects using network modeling. In his free time, he enjoys listening to audiobooks, watching movies, going to nature, and spending time with friends.

Anjali is a Bioengineering Ph.D. student and joined the lab as an undergraduate in August 2021. After earning her B.S. in Bioengineering at UCLA in 2023, she continued in the lab as a Ph.D. student. Anjali is interested in investigating methods to improve overprediction in network-approaches for drug repurposing. Outside the lab, she enjoys baking, reading, and playing the guitar.

Youzi is a first-year graduate student in the department of bioengineering at UCLA. Currently, Youzi is working to apply pathway optimization and engineering methods to discover the hidden pathways and networks in cardiovascular diseases, such as pulmonary arterial hypertension. Building on this knowledge, the goal of this project is to utilize a network approach, taking into consideration of multi-omics data, to better discover and understand the mechanisms of potential treatments to cardiovascular diseases. Outside of research, Youzi enjoys making music, reading, watching movies, cooking, traveling, and hiking.

Yifei is an undergraduate in the department of bioengineering at UCLA. Currently, Yifei is working to understand the various methods of modeling drug synergy in silico which is advantageous in cost and flexibility compared to in vitro drug combinatory screenings. Building on this knowledge, the goal of this project is to utilize a network approach, taking into consideration drug targets and protein pathways among other features, to model the effect of synergistic drug combinations. Outside of school, Yifei enjoys exploring the outdoors through activities such as hiking and learning to cook new dishes with moderate success.

Makena Rudy is an undergraduate bioengineering student at UCLA. She is currently working on disease phenotyping the electronic health record. Her work entails researching the clinical diagnosis and assessments of various diseases from a list of PathFX predicted drug pathways. From this list, she also translates the diseases into computable terms by utilizing OHDSI’s ATLAS platform. The goal of her research is to help conduct observational studies to investigate predicted drug pathways provided by the PathFX algorithm. She hopes to focus her research on women’s health and psychiatric diseases. In her free time, Makena enjoys playing club water polo.

Enoch is an undergraduate studying Bioengineering with a Data Science Engineering minor at UCLA. He is working on comparing different protein-protein interaction networks and studying their effect as different inputs in the PathFX algorithm. Outside of the lab, Enoch loves tutoring, playing the piano, and hanging out with his friends!

Kyle is currently a sophomore at University of Massachusetts, Amherst studying computer science and his interests are in software design. Kyle worked with Dr. Wilson during 2021 to build the benchmark_PathFX tool – a suite of code that compares how various sources of input data affect network predictions. With Kyle’s tool, the lab is actively investigating how changing drug binding and protein-protein interaction input data affect the ability to predict drug side effects.

Rayo Suseno (pronounced rah-yo su-say-no) is a Master’s student in the Department of Bioengineering at UCLA. During his internship for a genetics company as a bioinformatician, he was introduced to the idea of pharmacogenomics, which inspired him to join LUNE. Rayo aims to apply and learn bioinformatics skills for the validation and further advancement of drug network research. Specifically, he would like to investigate how patient genetic variants affect the development of disease pathways in PathFX, by utilizing various databases. In his free time, Rayo enjoys running, playing music, and listening to old songs, mainly from the 80s.

Jay is an undergraduate bioengineering student at UCLA. Currently, he is working on modeling the downstream effects of drugs on cardiac networks through using PathFX. He hopes to further understand cardiac-related drugs and their phenotypes by analyzing drug targets and their associations with other proteins through network modeling. Jay enjoys running, and rooting for his favorite sports teams in his free time.

Coming soon!

Josh is an undergraduate bioengineer at UCLA. Currently, he researches biomedical vocabularies and leverages the Unified Medical Language System to design translation tools. He aims to curb network overprediction via comparisons with established drug-condition relationship data. In his free time, Josh enjoys game development, programming, and distance running.

Emily is an undergraduate student studying Computational and Systems Biology, as well as Economics, at UCLA. Currently, she is working on using computational screens to study gene pathway networks and protein-protein interactions across psychiatric diseases. The goal of this project is to compare the results with other types of screenings to find the best approach to translational psychiatric projects. These results can help improve early lead development of the drugs. Outside of school, Emily enjoys playing games, listening to music, and cooking with her friends.

All graduate applications must go through the Bioengineering application process. If interested in joining the lab, or if you have questions about research projects, please email Dr. Wilson.