Jim Shaw

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

I 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.

My goal is to accelerate biology by providing faster, better tools for analyzing trillions of molecular sequences. A full-stack approach—including a mix of engineering, data science, and algorithms—is used; new theory is also developed when appropriate.

My algorithmic work is often driven by my biological interest in unraveling the latent complexity of microbiomes; for example, see my work on microbial divergence computation, metagenome profiling, and strain resolution.