People

Van Savage

Principal Investigator

Curriculum Vitae

David Hunt

Postdoctoral Researcher 

Kimberly Sheldon

Postdoctoral Researcher

Elif Tekin

Graduate Student (Biomathematics) 

Mauricio Cruz Loya 

Graduate Student (Biomathematics)

Nandini Chitale

Undergraduate Student, UCLA

Shanice Seawright

Visiting Undergraduate Student, Alabama A&M

Aditya Athota

High School Student 

Quentin Lepak

High School Student

Tony Dell

Postdoctoral Researcher 

Samraat Pawar

Postdoctoral Researcher

Lisa Patrick Bentley

Postdoctoral Researcher 

Mitchell Johnson

Graduate Student

Mitchell Johnson successfully defended his masters degree at UCLA in September. He is currently a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania with Joshua Plotkin. For his project he wrote software in OCaml to read angiographic data (e.g., MRI, CT scans, X-rays, etc.) and use image processing to extract the structure of the vascular system, including a  skeletonized network version and measures of vessel raddi, length, volumes, and more. He also wrote software for visualizing and analyzing the extracted data to determing the fractal exponents and types of distributions that characterize the vessel geometry across branching junctions.

Lewis Lee 

Postdoctoral Researcher

Lewis Lee is a doctoral student in the Department of Biomathematics and the System & Integrative Biology Training Program.  Current research in collaboration with Dr. Pamela Yeh’s laboratory aims to uncover structural dynamics of phenotypic variation in fluctuating environments using an experimental microbial system. This investigation may generate new  theoretical constructs for use in the study and mathematical modeling of bacterial and tumor heterogeneity.

Kevin Leu

Rotation Student, MSTP, DGSOM 

Kevin Leu (rotation student) is an MSTP student in the School of Medicine at UCLA. He is working to help connect models and data for tumor growth, and specifically how the structure and flow of tumor vasculature can be used to predict rates of growth, fractions of proliferative, quiescent, and necrotic cells, and regrowth after treatment.

Janice Chan 

Undergraduate Student

Janice Chan is currently a graduate student in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. While an undergraduate at UCLA, she learned Matlab and begain analyzing key traits, such as consumption and population growth rate, from our comprehensive database to test the hypothesis of "Hotter is Better"--higher temperatures result in higher absolute values for fitness and other traits. 

Kina Winoto 

Undergraduate Student

Kina Winoto graduated with a computer science degree from the UCLA School of Engineering and Applied Science. After leaving UCLA, she earned a Masters in Computer Science Columbia University and now works at Sandia National Laboratories. As part of and NSF funded REU project, she worked on a comprehensive database for the temperature responses of traits and migrated it from Access to MySql. She also streamlined the database as part of this process and helpied to develop a web interface for other  researchers to upload, download, and analyze data as part of this evolving trait database. 

Preeti Chayapathi

Undergraduate Student

Preeti Chayapathi graduated from UCLA in 2015 as a Computational and Systems Biology major. She conducted research to explore space filling geometries and how they connect with self similarity, asymmetry, and scaling in vascular networks. She also worked to develop code that would allow the Angicart software to be run from Matlab and be fully coordinated with the data analysis.

Tang-wei (William) King

Undergraduate Student 

Tang-wei (William) King graduated from UCLA and is now a graduate student in the Department of Biology and University of Washington. He has in interests in marine biology and thermal responses. He helped to manage the Biotraits database and website,  and he analyzed data from Biotraits to test for latitudinal patterns in thermal responses within and across species.

Kathryn Burch 

Undergraduate Student

Kathryn Burch graduated from UCLA as an Computational and Systems Biology major and will soon start as a graduate student in Bioinformatics at UCLA. She is involved in research to explore self similarity, asymmetry, and scaling in vascular networks. She is running the OCaml code, Angicart, on angiographic images and analyzing the large volumes of data extracted from those images. She is interested in how results vary across species and between healthy and diseased states. 

Benjamin Demaree 

Visiting Undergraduate Student, Santa Clara University

Benjamin Demaree graduated from Santa Clara University and is now a graduate student in Bioengineering at UC Berkeley. He was an AmGen scholar in my lab during the Summer of 2013. He researched self similarity, asymmetry, and scaling in vascular networks. He wrote code to analyze vascular data and simulated vascular networks with asymmetric branching to discover simple models that best match real data. 

Dalit Yadegaran

Undergraduate Student 

Dalit Yadegaran graduated from UCLA. Her work involved a research project to explored mechanisms that control species interactions. The project uses high-speed video and automated tracking software to understand how environmental drivers  (e.g., light, temperature, humidity, etc) affect the components and dynamics of predator-prey relationships. She was primarily responsible for running predator-prey trials with a variety of insects as well as analysis of video using Matlab. 

Agafe Saguros 

Undergraduate Student

Agafe Saguros graduated from UCLA and used video and automated tracking software to understand how temperature affects predator-prey interactions in insects via its effects on components such as body velocity, detection distance, turning angle, handling time, and other factors. She is currently a pharmacy intern at the University Medical Center
of Southern Nevada.

Sania Pouyanard

Undergraduate Student

Sania Pouyanard graduated from UCLA and worked with video and automated tracking software to study how temperature and dimensionality of the seach space/habitat can affect consumption rates in predator-prey interactions for insects. 

Angelicia Thomas

Visiting Undergraduate Student, Alabama A&M

Angelicia Thomas graduated from Alabama A&M University as a physics major. She worked in the Savage lab to stitch together images of zerbrafish vasculature across the entire body of the fish and that could be tracked across development. She also used angicart to analyze the data and search for patterns in the vasculature.

Junyu Cao

Visiting Undergraduate Student, Xi'an Jiatong University

Junyu Cao graduated from Xi'an Jiatong University and will be attending graduate school at UC Berkeley in Operations Research and Management. Junyu worked to developed new theory for the function of sleep by analyzing developmental data for sleep times, brain size, and brain metabolic  rate, and then comparing results for how sleep changes with size across species. By investigating prominent hypotheses for the function of sleep, such as repair and reorgnization, this research could help disentangle the relative roles and timing of various functions.

Maya Josyula

High School Student

Maya Josyula graduated from high school from Cupertino, CA and will begin CalTech in Fall 2015. She helped to perform a sensitivity analysis for algortihms used in the OCaml code, Angicart, as applied to available angiographic images. She also helped to analyze data for branching angles and for asymmetric length distributions as well as understanding and helping to develop models to understand these data. 

Matthew Aquilina

High School Student

Matthew Aquilina helped the lab edit and improve its MySQL databases and webpages for searching and downloading data. 

Edward Hu

High School Student

Edward Hu analyzed empirical data for vascular networks and helped to conduct rigorous tests of theories for optimal branching angles and length distributions. He will be attending USC.