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/software/theory for biological sequence analysis and apply these methods to investigate important problems in microbial and microbiome genomics.

I like to approach computational biology with a “full-stack approach”: start from an interesting biology question, create algorithms backed by theory, engineer widely-used bioinformatics software, and then (hopefully!) discover something fundamental about how microbial genomes came to be.

More specifically, two intertwined themes define my current work:

1. Building sophisticated bioinformatics tools to improve the analysis of massive microbial and meta-omics data.
2. Obtaining new insights about microbiome genome evolution through principled analytical methods.

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