STUDENT PROFILES
Griffin Weber
Area
Biomedical Informatics, Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology (HST)Focus
Weber does more than simply apply programming solutions to medical problems; he has created software that parses human DNA sequences from those of harmful germs in the blood and tissues of a patient.Education
Harvard University, S.B. in Biomedical Sciences and EngineeringThe Ph.D. program at SEAS was the only one to which I sent an application. The kind of research I was doing was cutting edge, and I wanted to design a custom curriculum that spanned multiple departments such as computer science, statistics, genetics, and neuroscience.
I knew that SEAS promotes interdisciplinary collaboration, not only among its own faculty, but also with researchers in other fields, such as the life sciences.One of the projects I am currently working on is phylogenetic tree reconstruction.
With faculty member Stuart Shieber, Harvard College Professor and James O. Welch, Jr. and Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer Science, I developed stochastic search algorithms that take the DNA sequences from different organisms and computationally predict how they are evolutionarily related.
I have brought our work over to collaborators at Harvard Medical School and used it to find genetic links between different mitochondrial diseases.
As both a medical student and a SEAS graduate student, I have been in the unique position to see the problem from both viewpoints.
The research I am most proud of consists of those projects in which I have been able to take the skills I learned at SEAS and apply them to applications that benefit the patients I meet in the hospitals.