Danny Simpson

Hometown: Forest, VA

Danny completed their undergraduate education at the University of Virginia in 2010, majoring in mathematics with a focus in computer science, and proceeded to Northeastern University for a Masters of Science in mathematics. After a brief detour teaching mathematics and biology to high school students, Danny enrolled in NYU Tandon's bioinformatics master's program.

While at NYU Tandon, Danny was able to gain hands-on experience in practical lab experiments by volunteering in Dr. Mande Holford's lab at Hunter College. Danny helped assemble the first genomes and transcriptomes for several species of sea snails and worms as part of their work here, and their MS thesis involved the identification of bioluminescent proteins from amino acid sequences determined from RNA-seq using novel semi-supervised machine learning algorithms, particularly in the context of several species of bioluminescent sea worms. This work developed Danny's interest in applying machine learning to biological problems, which they are pursuing in a current Ph.D., and NYU Tandon's Bioinformatics Program provided funding that allowed Danny to attend the first International Conference on Machine Learning Computational Biology Symposium in 2016.

In early 2016, Danny began an internship in Dr. Tomas Kirchhoff's laboratory at the NYU Langone Perlmutter Cancer Center, exploring the connections between germline genetics and melanoma. Danny has continued to work with Dr. Kirchhoff until starting a Ph.D. at Princeton in 2018, and their work in Dr. Kirchoff's lab has resulted in numerous publications, poster presentations at multiple conferences including the American Society of Clinical Oncology Annual Meeting (2017 and 2018), and internal presentations to NYU faculty and staff.

Danny is currently attending Princeton University's Quantitative and Computational Biology Ph.D. program.