Jim Shaw

Hi there! I am a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. I work with Heng Li.

I recently got my PhD in Math at the University of Toronto, 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 of genomics data. I enjoy thinking about how to extract robust signals from large datasets quickly.

My applied interests lean towards the study of microbiomes, e.g., microbial divergence computation, metagenome profiling, and strain resolution. However, I’m broadly interested in important genomics problems.

Exact techniques used include a mix of engineering, data science, and algorithms; new theory is developed when appropriate. I particularly like “full-stack” bioinformatics development, going from math + biology to widely-adopted software.