Welcome to JRaviLab!

We develop general-purpose computational approaches that integrate large-scale heterogeneous public datasets that lead to the mechanistic understanding of microbial genotypes, phenotypes, and diseases.

Specifically, we focus on two key questions:

  1. How do we link microbial genotypes to phenotypic traits?
  2. How do we delineate molecular mechanisms underlying host response to infection and discover host-directed therapeutics?

Along with the scientific pursuit, we release open data/software and easy-to-use web-servers for wide use by the biomedical community. We also focus on community engagement, education, and outreach.

Keywords

Computational biology & Bioinformatics | Molecular evolution & phylogeny | Comparative pathogenomics | Molecular drug/vaccine discovery | Microbial pathogenesis | Infectious diseases | Data analysis & visualization

Super powers!

Computational Biology

Pathogenomics & Molecular Evolution

Disease-Drug signatures

Data Analysis & Viz

Education

Diversity

Lab News

CPMR-DBMI dyad pilot grants!

We received two Colorado Program for Musculoskeletal Research (CPMR) / Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) dyad pilot grants.

  • With Dr. Honey Hendesi on studying how the effect of intermittent fasting on the gut microbiome impacts bone health and fracture healing
  • With Dr. Reed Ayers on studying metallosis — how bacteria (and hosts) break down metal implants (that supposedly can’t be corroded!)

See Associated news article

NIH U01 funding!

Our project on developing novel data science technologies to study antimicrobial resistance is officially now funded by NIH NIAID! If you are interested in bridging microbial genotypes to phenotypes, esp. in the context of AMR, come join us!

Now looking for postdocs: check out CU ad here.

New folks in the group! (2022-2023)

Exciting times as we welcome new people to our group:

  • 2023-06: Evalyn Resnick, undergraduate researcher (planning to attend Simpson College starting in the Fall of 2023; Biology major – pre-medicine/pre-veterinary track)
  • 2023-06: Kritika Verma, undergraduate researcher (pursuing Bachelor of Technology, Cluster Innovation Centre at University of Delhi)
  • 2023-06: Sana Paktinyar, undergraduate researcher (pursuing BS in Bimolecular Chemical Engineering, Pre-Med Track at California Institute of Technology)
  • 2023-06: Vy ‘Andy’ Tran, undergraduate researcher (pursuing BS in Physics at University of Colorado Boulder)
  • 2022-11: Jake Krol, postbac, Informational Science Professional (BS, Computational Neuroscience from MSU)
  • 2023-02: Karla Vela Lopez, graduate researcher (pursuing MS in Biomedical Sciences and Biotechnology, CU Anschutz)
  • 2023-02: Jill Bilodeaux, graduate rotation student from Microbiology
  • 2023-03: Kewalin Samart & Keenan Manpearl, two graduate pseudo-rotation students from Computational Biosciences
  • 2023-05: Evan Brenner, postdoc (PhD, Comparative Medicine and Integrative Biology, MSU)

2023 Manuscripts

  • Joshua M. Lensmire, Michael R. Wischer, Cristina Kraemer-Zimpel, Paige J. Kies, Lo Sosinski, Elliot Ensink, Jack P. Dodson, John C. Shook, Phillip C. Delekta, Christopher C. Cooper, Daniel H. Havlichek Jr., Martha H. Mulks,Sophia Y. Lunt, Janani Ravi, Neal D. Hammer. The glutathione import system satisfies the Staphylococcus aureus nutrient sulfur requirement and promotes interspecies competition. PLoS Genetics . 2023. DOI.

Highlighted in CU Anschutz newsletter

A recent article highlighted Janani’s recent efforts in building diverse communities & creating inclusive safe spaces/conferences. The article is titled: Breaking Barriers and Creating Opportunities for Underrepresented People in Data Science

Moved to CU Anschutz

We are thrilled to announce that the JRaviLab recently moved from MSU to CU Anschutz. We are now part of the new Dept. of Biomedical Informatics, Center for Health Artificial Intelligence, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.

First NIH $$

  • (co-PI) Notice of Award for NIH NIAID Data Science R21 on “Mechanism-guided drug repurposing for host-directed therapy of infectious diseases using interpretable and integrative ML” | co-PI: Arjun Krishnan

2022 Student Accomplishments

  • Ethan receives a summer research scholarship from the MSU College of Natural Science, and presents at his first international meeting!
  • [Outgoing] Kewalin graduated from MSU with the McCartney Math Award for outstanding graduating Math majors. She will be joining the University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Campus, Computational Biosciences graduate program this Fall (joining us back in Aug @CU!). She also received grad admits at MSU (BMS, CMSE), and Penn State, along with the College of Engineering Distinguished Scholarship at MSU, the Rasmussen Doctoral Recruitment Award at MSU.
  • [Outgoing] Joseph Burke graduated from MSU with an outstanding student award from the Dept of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, and three co-primary author publications under his belt. He’s now a software engineer at CRISPR Therapeutics.
  • [Outgoing] Elliot Majlessi graduated from MSU and is taking a gap year to apply to Medical School!
  • [Outgoing] Mary Zhang graduated from Carleton College to join med school at the National University of Singapore, Fall of ‘22!

2022 Manuscripts

  • Burke JTp, Chen SZp, Sosinski LMp, Johnston JB, Ravi Jc. MolEvolvR: A webapp for characterizing proteins using molecular evolution and phylogeny. bioRxiv 2022. Webapp
  • Joo Rp,c, Sánchez-Tapia Ap, Mortara S, Saibene YB, et al., Ravi Jc. Ten simple rules to host an inclusive conference. PLoS Computational Biology. 2022. DOI GitHub
  • Conner KNp, Burke JTp, Ravi Jc, Hardy JWc. Novel Internalin P homologs in Listeria ivanovii londoniensis and Listeria seeligeri. Microbial Genomics. 2022. DOI GitHub
  • Blaine HCp, Burke JTp, Ravi Jc, Stallings CLc. DciA helicase operators exhibit diversity across bacterial phyla. Journal of Bacteriology. 2022. DOI GitHub
  • Cantoria MJp, Alizadeh Ep, Ravi J, et al., Feedback in the β-catenin destruction complex imparts bistability and cellular memory. bioRxiv 2022.
  • [update] Hsueh BYp, Severin GBp, et al., now at Nature Microbiology (2022)! DOI
    pco-primary authors; cco-corresponding authors. In bold, members of JRaviLab.

2021 Manuscripts

  • [update] Samart Kp, Tuyishime Pp, Krishnan Ac, Ravi Jc published in Briefings in Bioinformatics (2021)! DOI | Live doc | GitHub.
  • Ravi Jp,c, Fioravanti Ap,c. S-layers: the proteinaceous multifunctional armours of Gram-positive pathogens. Frontiers in Microbiology 2021. DOI
  • Hsueh BYp, Severin GBp, et al., A Broadly Conserved Deoxycytidine Deaminase Protects Bacteria from Phage Infection. bioRxiv 2021.
  • Lensmire JM, et al., Ravi J, Hammer ND. The glutathione import system satisfies the Staphylococcus aureus nutrient sulfur requirement and promotes interspecies competition. bioRxiv 2021.
  • [update] Hadi SAp, Kolte IVp, Brenner EPp, et al., Ravi J, Sreevatsan S, Basta PC. Identification of a predominant genotype of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in Brazilian indigenous population. Scientific Reports. 2021;11(1):1224. DOI
    pco-primary authors; cco-corresponding authors. In bold, members of JRaviLab.

More $$ for the group!

  • (PI) Awarded the Endowed Research, Sheila McMonagle Fund from the College of Veterinary Medicine, MSU for the molecular evolution project!
  • (PI) Received grant support from the NSF-funded BEACON Center for ML-based feature detection and comparative pathogenomics.
  • (co-I) Received a grant from Spectrum Health and MSU Alliance for a COVID-19 project!
  • (subaward) Received NIH NIAID grant subaward to study molecular pathogenesis in Staphylococci using computational approaches

2021 Student Accomplishments

  • Kewalin, Sam, Vignesh, Elliot, and Joe present at their first (inter)national meetings!
  • Kewalin received several research scholarships for 2021, including the Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (EnSURE), MSU; College of Natural Science scholarships for Spring and Fall.
  • Ethan Wolfe and Amy Tonielli join the group! They received Professorial Assistantships from the Honors College, MSU (given to the Top200 students).
  • Elliot received the NIH R25-funded BRUSH summer scholarship.
  • [Outgoing] Sam Chen graduated as one of 38 students across MSU with a 4.0 GPA. He’s now a software engineer at Amazon Inc.
  • [Outgoing] Phil Calhoun graduated with Honors and joined the MSU College of Human Medicine.

First manuscripts submitted from JRaviLab!

Two preprints submitted to arXiv and bioRxiv in Sep ‘20! Another manuscript under review in Scientific Reports w/ collaborator, Dr. Sreevatsan!

  • Samart Kp, Tuyishime Pp, Krishnan Ac, Ravi Jc. Reconciling multiple connectivity scores for drug repurposing. arXiv 2020 | Live doc | GitHub.
  • Ravi Jc, Anantharaman V, Chen SZ, Datta, P, Aravind Lc, Gennaro MLc. Phage-shock-protein (Psp) Envelope Stress Response: Evolutionary History & Discovery of Novel Players. bioRxiv 2020 | Webapp.
    pco-primary authors; cco-corresponding authors. In bold, members of JRaviLab.

2020 Student Accomplishments

  • Karn and Sam received Honorable mention for their posters at ISMB 2020 (by International Society for Computational Biology)!
  • Karn and Sam were nominated for the NSF-funded REU-ACRES program from ICER, MSU! Karn also gets accepted into the AdvanceU internship program at MSU!
  • Phil received the NIH NHLBI-funded BRUSH scholarship from the College of Veterinary Medicine!
  • Kewalin received the MSU College of Natural Science, Scholarship to work with us this Spring!
  • Lauryn joined us from Hampton University, Virginia starting Jul ‘20 (as part of NSURP, BIPOC research program for microbiologists). Now a PREP student at the University of Pennsylvania.
  • [Outgoing] Phoebe received the Mastercard foundation scholarship to work back home in Rwanda from Oct ‘20; University of British Columbia, Fall ‘21. She also gets grad admits from Purdue University and UC Davis!
  • [Outgoing] Lo got accepted into the MSU post-baccalaureate program to start working with Dr. Rob Quinn (BMB, MSU) from Sep ‘20. Lo is now pursuing their PhD at Michigan State University.

Janani & Camille win the Excellence in Diversity Award!

Janani & Camille win the All-University Excellence in Diversity Award for founding R-Ladies East Lansing! The MSU President & Provost granted the award during the EIDA ceremony!

2019 Grants

Received the Launch Award from MSU’s Diversity Research Network for the drug-repurposing project!
Awarded the Endowed Research, Harvey J Fiege Fund from the College of Veterinary Medicine, MSU for the molecular evolution project!

PI

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. My research group develops computational approaches that can leverage large-scale genomic data to gain testable insights into infectious disease biology, focusing on microbial genotypes, phenotypes, and diseases. I also teach fundamentals of data analysis, visualization, and reproducible research, especially programming to diverse groups in non-traditional settings. As part of this effort, I founded R-Ladies East Lansing, R-Ladies Aurora, Women+ Data Science, and AsiaR, three organizations that promote diversity in data science through meetups & webinars. Our recent work was featured in the CU newsletter.

Interests

Education

  • PhD in Genetics, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, 2011

    Virginia Tech | Blacksburg, VA

  • BTech in Biotechnology, 2006

    Anna University | Chennai, India

Meet the Team

Students

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Kewalin Samart

Graduate Researcher

Computational Biology, Statistical Genomics, Method Development, Applied Mathematics, Machine Learning

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Charmie Vang

Graduate Researcher

microbial pathogenesis

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Ethan Wolfe

Undergraduate Researcher

Computational Biology, Biochemistry

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Kritika Verma

Undergraduate Researcher

Computational Biology, Mathematics

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Landon Buskirk

Undergraduate Researcher

Machine Learning, Statistical Analysis, Data Engineering

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Sana Paktinyar

Undergraduate Researcher

Computational Biology, Engineering, Medicine

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Sarah Mentzer

Undergraduate Researcher

Postdoc(s)

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Evan Brenner

Postdoctoral Researcher

Microbial pathogenesis, Phylogenomics, Bioinformatics

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Abhirupa Ghosh

Postdoctoral Researcher

Microbial Genomics, Metagenomics, Infectious Diseases, Respiratory Diseases, Antimicrobial Resistance, Machine Learning, Comparative Genomics

Research Professional(s)

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Raymond L Lesiyon

Information Science Professional

Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, Genomics, Software Development, NLP, LLM, & PLM

Alumni

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Lo Sosinski

Graduate Student

Computational Biology, Molecular Evolution, Biochemistry

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Joseph Burke

Software Engineer

Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, Genomics

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Jacob Krol

Information Science Professional

Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, Genomics, Software development, Statistics, Machine Learning, High Performance Computing, Electrophysiology

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Samuel Chen

Software Engineer

Data Science, Web-apps, Software Development

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Phoebe Tuyishime

Graduate Student

Drug-repurposing, Infectious Diseases, Public Health, Nutrition

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Amy Tonielli

Undergraduate Researcher

Drug repurposing, Biomedical Lab Science

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Elliot Majlessi

Postbac

Antibiotic Resistance, Infectious Diseases, Biochemistry

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Evalyn Resnick

Undergraduate Researcher

Human and animal medicine

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Jill Bilodeaux

Graduate Researcher

Microbial Genomics, Antimicrobial Resistance, Computational Biology

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Karla Vela Lopez

Graduate Researcher

Computational Biology, Human Genomics, Drug Repurposing, Ontologies, Biotechnology

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Karn Jongnarangsin

Undergraduate Researcher

Computer Science, Data Science, OOP, Web Development

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Keenan Manpearl

Graduate Researcher

Machine learning, Computational Biology

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Lauryn Brooks

Postbac

Comparative Pathogenomics, Biochemistry

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Mary Zhang

Medical Student

Molecular Evolution, Molecular Biology, Synthetic Biology

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Philip Calhoun

Medical Student

sRNA discovery, Infectious diseases, Human biology

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Vignesh Sridhar

Asst. Vice President

Data Science, Machine Learning

Vy 'Andy' Tran

Undergraduate Researcher

Computational Biology, Bioengineering

Recent Publications

Filter from the full list here | Associated data/software are on GitHub

DciA Helicase Operators Exhibit Diversity across Bacterial Phyla

Despite the fundamental importance of DNA replication for life, this process remains understudied in bacteria outside Escherichia coli …

Projects

.js-id-ongoing

Computational evolutionary approaches

Integrating molecular evolution and comparative genomics to achieve comprehensive, multiscale characterization of bacterial proteins …

sRNA discovery

Discovering unique pathogenic sRNA in infected hosts

Bacterial Stress Response

Studying stress response systems using molecular evolution and phylogenetics.

R & R-Ladies East Lansing

Posts, news, & material pertaining to R & R-Ladies East Lansing

Host-responses to infection

Characterizing host response to infection and host-directed interventions

Dynamical Systems & Modeling

Mathematical modeling of pathways involved in cell cycle regulation and differentiation

Recent & Upcoming Talks

see all talks here

MolEvolvR BTS: When and how to build a web-app and software package?

We recently developed a web application, MolEvolvR, to characterize proteins using molecular evolution and phylogeny. This session will …

Recent Posts

2018: Year in Books | Goodreads

My Year in Books: 2018!

2019: RLEL Upcoming Events

What’s in store for 2019: workshops, conference, bookclubs & more!

R-Ladies East Lansing: 2018, Year in Review

Some accomplishments from 2018 & announcements for 2019!

Contact