welcome.

I’m Sean (CV | LinkedIn), a principal scientist in the Pollard Lab at the Gladstone Institutes, a non-profit affiliated with UC San Francisco. My research uses the intersection of machine learning, evolution, gene regulation, and functional genomics to study disease in brain and heart development. We develop and test our predictive models with our wet lab collaborators such as the Ahituv, Pollen, and Rubenstein labs at UCSF and the Srivastava lab at Gladstone.

I have a Ph.D. in cybersecurity from UC Davis (w/Matt Bishop & Jim Crutchfield) and was a postdoc at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (I3P fellow) and Columbia University (w/Sal Stolfo) before switching to computational biology and doing a postdoc at Mount Sinai School of Medicine (w/Gaurav Pandey). I’m also interested in information visualization and virtual reality, having developed a network visualization tool with head tracking and gesture recognition for the KeckCAVES project.

My partner and frequent collaborator is Sophie Engle, an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of San Francisco.

publications.

The following papers, book chapters, and extended abstracts have all been peer reviewed. Computer science publishes much of its research via competitive peer-reviewed conference and workshop proceedings in addition to journals, whereas biology typically reserves peer review for journals.

tutorials.

• Chaotic Attractor Reconstruction
• Edge of Chaos
• Structural Drift