Ethan J. Armand

Hi, I'm Ethan!

I'm a Bioinformatics and systems biology PhD Student at UCSD. I am co-mentored by Dr. Bing Ren from the department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, and Dr. Zhouwen Tu from the Cognitive Science Department. The Ren lab focuses on massive profiling of single-cell epigenomes across tissues and diseases, while Dr. Tu's lab of Machine Learning Perception and Cognition focuses on computer vision, and fundamental questions in machine learning. Combing deep learning and single-cell genomics, we can learn the language of cells, particularly how they read DNA and figure out which genes they should turn on or off. Building on this language, we can understand the origin of genetic disease, and build molecular tools for reprogramming cells and treating disease.

Before joining the Ren lab I did my undergrad in the cognitive science department at UCSD. There, I became interested in genomics under the Mentorship of Eran A. Mukamel, where I worked on developing computational methods to analyze single-cell multi-omics data. Working with Eran, I was priveledge to have briliant and generous collaborators and mentors including Fangming Xie, Wayne I Doyle, Junhao Li, Joe R. Ecker, Chongyuan Luo, and Margarita Behrens.