Singh lab @ UIUC

Update: We just moved to UIUC from Brown!

Our research lab develops machine learning methods with the goals of data integration and model interpretation for biological and biomedical applications.

**Celebrating lab milestones (farewell to the graduating students), Providence Downtown (May 2025)**
First Row (Left to Right): Whitney Sloneker, Hyeyeon Hwang, Ritambhara Singh, Winston Li,
Mikayla Walsh, Jennifer Chen, Amina Abdullahi, Byron Butaney
Second Row (Left to Right): Keya Kilachand, Michal Golovanevsky, Hannah Snell
Third Row (Left to Right): Ghulam Murtaza, Xilin Wang, Eric Han, Colin Baker, Pranav Mahableshwarkar,
Eva Schiller, Jiaqi Zhang, Ziqi Zhang

Join our lab!

The lab is looking for highly motivated students, with strong computational skills, who are excited about developing data-driven approaches to solve important problems in biology and health sciences.

Required skills for lab members include basic UNIX/Linux competency and programming ability (preferably in Python). Coursework or project experience in machine learning and/or deep learning is highly preferred.

Prospective students, please apply directly to the CS graduate programs at UIUC and mention me in your application (no e-mails please!).

If you are at UIUC and interested in joining the lab or a researcher interested in collaborating with us, please e-mail ritsingh@illinois.edu.

Interested students already at UIUC are highly recommended to attend my Deep Learning in Genomics course (CS 489) or the Machine Learning for Bioinformatics course (CS 582).

Lab Members

Ritambhara Singh
Associate Professor
Computer Science and Data Science

Current Ph.D. Students

Whitney Sloneker
(Co-advisor: Lorin Crawford)
Computational Biology

Ananya Pavuluri
(Co-advisor: Erica Larschan)
Computational Biology

Tuan Pham
(Co-advisor: Erica Larschan)
Computational Biology

Hannah Snell
(Co-advisor: Sohini Ramachandran)
Computational Biology

Yu (Zoe) Zhu
(Primary Advisor: Ying Ma)
Computational Biology

Seowon Chang
(Primary Advisor: Ying Ma)
Computational Biology

Masters Students

Aravind Krishnan Anand Iyer
M.S in Computer Science

Mingxin (Bowen) Liu
M.S in Biotechnology

Undergraduate Students

Research Assistants

Visiting Students

Fernando Peralta Castro
Moravian University
exploreCSR 2025 Program

Srimaan Sridharan
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
The Leadership Alliance’s SR-EIP program

Alan Liu
Haverford College
The Leadership Alliance’s SR-EIP program

Former Lab Members

Doctoral Students
Jiaqi Zhang [CS] → Postdoctoral candidate at University of Maryland
Atishay Jain [CS] → Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Roblox
Michal Golovanevsky [CS] (Co-advisor Carsten Eickhoff) → Postdoctoral candidate at Harvard Medical School
Tassallah (Amina) Abdullahi [CS] (Co-advisor Carsten Eickhoff) → Senior Responsible AI Data Scientist at Humana
Ghulam Murtaza [CS] → Postdoctoral candidate at University of Washington
Hyeyeon Hwang (Co-advisor: Nikos Tapinos) [CompBio] → Research Scientist at Tinos Therapeutics Inc.
Pinar Demetci (Co-advisor: Sorin Istrail) [CompBio] → Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at Broad Institute
Jeremy Bigness (Co-advisor: Erica Larschan) [CompBio] → Research Scientist at Agilent
Rebecca Santorella (Primary Advisor: Björn Sandstede) [APMA] → Data Scientist at OM1

Masters’ Students
Winston Li (CS)
Matthew Murakami (CS) → Research Edison at GE Aeropsace
Yuqi Lei (CS) → Ph.D. student at Vanderbilt University
Zhirui Li (DSI) → Ph.D. student at University of Florida
Adam Berkley (CS) → Associate Professional Staff at John Hopkins University
Camillo Saueressig (CS Concurrent MS) → TUM-LMU Medical program (Germany)
Suchen Zheng (CS) → Ph.D. student at Yale University

Undergraduate Students
Xilin (Rice) Wang (Class ’25), Bumjin Joo (Class ’25), Pranav Mahableshwarkar (Class ’25), Jennifer Chen (Class ’25), Keya Kilachand (Class ’25), Eric Han (Class ’25), Sean Yu (Class ’25), Hannah Beakley (Class ’25), Byron Butaney (Class ’25), Colin Baker (Class ’25), Mikayla Walsh (Class ’25), Eva Schiller (Class ’25)
Jay Gopal (Class ’25) → Medical Student at Brown Medical School
Akira Nair (Class ’24) → Ph.D. student at University of Pennsylvania
Wangdrak Dorji (Class ’24) → Masters student at Brown University
Manav Chakravarthy (Class ’24) → Masters student at Brown University
Shalin Patel (Class ’23) → Software and Quantitative Engineer at GTS
Nitya Thakkar (Class ’23) → Ph.D. student at Stanford University
Yuan Pu (Class ’23) → Post Graduate Research Assistant at Yale University
Alexander Le (Class ’23) → Software Engineer at Amazon
Momoka Kobayashi (Class ’23) → Software Engineer at Bloomberg
David (Inho) Lee (Class ’23) → Software Engineer at Google
Sally Zhi (Class ’22) → Software Engineer at Google
Jordan Idehen (Class ’22) → Software Engineer at Spotify
Madeline Hughes (Class ’22) → Post Graduate Research Assistant at Microsoft Research
Hossam Zaki (Class ’22) → Brown University Medical School
Justin Sanders (Class ’22) → Ph.D. student at University of Washington
Muhammad Haider Asif (Class ’22) → Software Engineer at Microsoft
Shreya D’Souza (Class ’21) → Information Systems Associate at Amgen
Ishaani Kahtri (Class ’21) → Brown University Medical School
Xavier Loinaz (Class ’21) → Post Graduate Research Assistant at Broad Institute
Lucas Paulo de Lima (Class ’21) → University of Cambridge Medical School
Giselle Garcia (Class ’21) → Software Engineer at Capital One
Elliot Kang (Class ’20) → Software Engineer at Palantir

Visiting Undergraduate Research Assistants
Idranne Mbah Ndum (Mount Holyoke College): exploreCSR 2025 Program
Thulasi Varatharajan (University of Pittsburgh): Leadership Alliance Summer Research – Early Identification Program (SR-EIP) 2021

Visiting High-School Students
Sara Nath (Gatton Academy, Bowling Green, KY) → Undergraduate student at MIT
Carmen Boyan (Classical High School, Providence RI) → Undergraduate student at Stanford University

Location

TBA