Jim Shaw

Hi there! I am an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. I work with Heng Li.

I obtained my PhD in Math at the University of Toronto, where I was advised by Yun William Yu. Previously, I studied Engineering Physics + Mathematics at the University of British Columbia.

Research interests

I develop algorithms/tools/theory for biological sequence analysis and its downstream applications. I tend to approach computational biology with a “full-stack approach”, starting from algorithms backed by theory to engineering widely-used software.

My computational work is driven by my interest in unraveling the latent complexity of microbiomes. The tremendous activity of microbial communities that live around us have important functional consequences. Two common themes define my work:

1. How do we obtain novel insights from microbiome data through principled computational methods?
2. How can we democratize the massive computational analysis of microbial omics data?

For example, see my work on ultrafast microbial divergence computation, rapid metagenome profiling, and strain-level long-read assembly.