Rex is a senior undergraduate student majoring in Bioinformatics and Statistics with a minor in Computer Science and Mathematics at Brigham Young University. He is experienced as a Research Assistant in Dr. Piccolo’s lab, and Group Project Leader in the Bioinformatics Research Group (BRG) at BYU.
In Dr. Piccolo’s research lab, Rex has focused on building software tools for scientists without computational skills. In this position he has worked in Python and R to optomize big data filtering with some dataset files over 50 gb. To optomize the filtering of these files, he made automated scripts that would download dependencies needed and prepare data into proper formats. He has also mentored students starting research, and has helped them gain the skillsets necessary for research.
The BRG almost exclusively consists of and is led by undergraduate students. The BRG has three goals: to help students develop research skills, to actively publish research, and to provide students with additional exposure to bioinformatics applications in industry. The BRG meets weekly to pursue these goals toward research. In the past two semesters Rex has led these discussions for participation in two different data science machine learning competitions. The first competition used a mulilayer perceptron to analyze hyperspectral and LIDAR remote sensing images for tree species classification. The second competition focuses on data from the Connectivity Map (CMAP, build02) dataset. This data was used to predict liver drug response injury based through analysis of RNA expression data. The group used an ensemble soft-voting method in the competition. Both of these competition results are in the process of being published. Rex will be presenting his results from the camda competition in Chicago.
Rex has developed skills in Python, R, and Git. He has also become familiar with C, Java, C++, Html and JavaScript.
