Our Team of Experts Experienced. Insightful. Accessible.
Diversigen is comprised of a team of experts who are passionate about their work, have excelled in their field, and have an extensive background in the microbiome industry.
Tasha Santiago-Rodriguez PhD
Bioinformatician
Tasha received a PhD from the University of Puerto Rico in Public Health Water Microbiology, characterizing bacteriophages as indicators of human fecal contamination and went on to conduct postdoctoral research at the University of California, San Diego, focusing on virome research related to Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections, urinary tract infections, and antibiotic use. She was also a recipient of a postdoctoral fellowship from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to conduct research on ancient microbiomes and viromes at the California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. She later joined the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC) Center for Translational Microbiology to develop reference materials for microbiome research. Tasha has published over 40 articles and book chapters in water microbiology, bacteriophages, as well as ancient and modern microbiomes and viromes.
Watch here, to see Dr. Santiago-Rodriguez present on “Viral Metagenomics and the Use of Standards: From Biology to Clinical Applications”
Eric Smith PhD
Bioinformatician
Eric earned his Bachelor of Arts from the University of St. Thomas and went on to earn a PhD in Genetics, Genomics, and Bioinformatics from the University of California, where he researched the evolutionary and population genetics of infectious diseases in mosquitoes. Eric joined Diversigen after completing post-doctoral studies on microbial symbionts of honeybees.
Watch here, to see Dr. Smith present on Diversigen's bioinformatic platform for CAZyme characterization.
Christian Sanchez MSc
Bioinformatician
Christian graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Bioinformatics from the University of Saint Thomas, in Houston. He later joined the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor College of Medicine as a Bioinformatics Programmer. Christian later received a Master of Science from the University of Houston in 2019 where he worked with Machine Learning-Adversarial Examples.
Alex La Reau PhD
Bioinformatician
Alex graduated from the University of Wisconsin – Madison with a Bachelor of Science in microbiology and went on to work in the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center where he researched microbial biofuel production. Alex later earned his PhD in microbiology at the University of Wisconsin researching the effects of the microbiome on cow health and growth.
Emmase Adams PhD
Bioinformatician
Emmase holds a Bachelor of Science in Natural Sciences from the University of Alaska, Anchorage. She received a PhD in Biomedical Informatics with a specialization in clinical informatics and nanomedicine from Rutgers, New Jersey. At Rutgers, she developed a novel clinical decision support system for pancreatic cancer risk assessment. With over ten years experience in clinical diagnostics, statistics, and big data analytics, Emmase has in-depth knowledge of designing clinical systems, algorithms, and utilizing R, SAS, and SPSS for statistical analysis.
Mike Guo PhD
Mike holds a Ph.D. in Geophysics from Nanjing University, and in Computer Information System Engineering from Tennessee State University. He is a Geophysicist, a Biophysicist, and a Bioinformatics Scientist with 30 years research experience. Mike Guo has 11 year's experience as a bioinformatician, he has previously been a Bioinformatician/Statistical Genetic Analyst-III at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and as a Research Associate Professor on Bioinformatics at University of New Mexico Health Science Center. After joining Diversigen in 2018 Mike works on WGS and 16S raw data pipelines, demultiplexing, and more.
Virginia Riquelme PhD
Virginia earned a PhD. in Civil Engineering and an M.S. in Environmental Engineering from Virginia Tech. Her studies focused on detection and mitigation of biological contaminants in wastewater via molecular biology and nanotechnology tools. Her postdoctoral research at Virginia Tech focused on metagenomic profiling of antibiotic resistance genes in wastewaters at a global scale. Her current work at Diversigen is primarily focused on qPCR primer-probe design and data analysis.
Zach Henseler PhD
Bioinformatician
After receiving a Bachelor of Science from the University of St. Thomas, Zach worked in the Max Planck Institute for Development Biology where he researched host-microbe coevolution via the innate immune system and received his PhD. before joining Diversigen.
Kranti Konganti MSc
Kranti received his Masters in bioinformatics from Northeastern University. He has worked extensively in in academia developing bioinformatic tools for genomic sequencing and analysis and is well experienced in data analysis optimization for sequencing data.
Gordon Bentely MSc
Gordon has been a scientist in human diagnostics for over 20 years. As a Principal Scientist at Roche Molecular Diagnostics, he lead the team that developed the first next generation sequencing (NGS)-based high-resolution HLA typing assay for bone marrow transplantation, and received the 2008 ASHI Scholar award for this work. He also established NGS-based HIV sequencing for drug resistance typing and studies of infection susceptibility at UCSF and The Gladstone Institutes. As a Staff Scientist at Arc Bio, he was part of a team that developed an NGS-based sample-to-answer pathogen identification pipeline for human clinical infectious disease testing. He later joined Personalis, Inc. as the Process Development Scientist overseeing the development and implementation of an NGS-based lab process for immune-oncology profiling from cell-free DNA (liquid biopsy). Now at Diversigen in Minneapolis, Gordon manages the R&D efforts relating to the services offerings team.
Noah Strom PhD
Bioinformatician
Noah holds a Ph.D. in Plant and Microbial Biology and a B.S. in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior from the University of Minnesota. His doctoral research focused on characterizing relationships between fungal communities, plant parasitic nematodes, and the yields of corn and soybean crops. His postdoctoral research focused on identifying transcriptomic changes in plants colonized by mutualistic fungi, as well as biomarkers associated with swine manure foaming. Noah has in-depth experience with bioinformatics pipelines and using R for statistical analysis.
We’re hiring! Join our team!
Diversigen provides services and generates data for research purposes only. Not all services are available in all regions.
