Staff

Dhivya Arasappan has many years experience analyzing NGS data from multiple platforms: Illumina, PacBio and SOLiD. Her areas of expertise include: de novo genome assembly, particularly using hybrid sequencing data, RNA-Seq analysis, exome analysis, and benchmarking of bioinformatics tools. She is the research educator for the Big Data in Biology Freshman Research Initiative stream and teaches an RNA-Seq course as part of the Summer School for Big Data in Biology.

Dr. Wylie joined the Bioinformatics group in 2015. He has experience in NGS data analysis (including variant calling and analysis of RNA-seq and metagenomic data) and application of statistical and machine learning methods to biological data sets for biomarker discovery, pathway analysis, classification and regression modeling, and motif analysis. Prior to UT, Dennis earned a PhD in Biophysics from UC Berkeley applying stochastic simulation methods to problems in immunology and did postdoctoral work in modeling the transmission of infectious diseases on contact networks before spending six years as a bioinformatician in industry.

Benni Goetz joined the Bioinformatics Consulting Group in 2012. Before joining, Benni studied differential geometry at the University of Texas and completed a Master's Degree in Mathematics.  He has experience with transcriptome assembly and annotation, bacterial genome annotation, and next-generation sequence databases. He also can implement custom pipelines, or parallelize existing pipelines to run at TACC, and has familiarity with Python and Bash scripting.

Anna Battenhouse is a research scientist in the labs of Drs. Edward Marcotte and Vishy Iyer as well as leading the Biomedical Research Support Facility in its mission to support the IT and computational needs of the UT Austin biomedical research community. She has extensive experience working with NGS data, and teaches the Introduction to NGS Tools course in the Big Data in Biology Summer School as well as several CBRS short courses.

Anna received a B.A. in English Literature from Carleton College in 1978. After a career in commercial software development from 1982-2007, Anna began her "retirement career" in functional genomics in the Iyer lab, and obtained a B.S. in Biochemistry from UT Austin in 2013.