The Team
Arslan Zaidi
Principal investigator
Arslan is an assistant professor in the Department of Genetics, Cell, and Developmental Biology and a core member of the Institute of Health Informatics. He received his PhD in Genetics, with a minor in Statistics, from Penn State with Mark Shriver in 2016. He was a postdoc with Kateryna Makova (2016-2018) and then an NIH K99/R00 postdoc with Iain Mathieson (2019-2022). Besides his research interests, he is interested in making statistical genetics accessible. You can read more on his blog.
Nicole Kleman
Graduate student
Nicole is a PhD student in the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BICB) program at the University of Minnesota. She received her bachelors from UMN in Mathematical Biology with minors in computer science and genetics in 2022. She is studying the accuracy of different heritability estimators in structured populations.
Parisa Riahi
Graduate student
Parisa is an MS student in BICB. She received her bachelor's in statistics from The University of Tabriz, and her masters in biostatistics from Tarbiat Modares University in Iran. Then she studied the effects of assortative mating on complex traits in the Irani population under the supervision of Mahdi Akbarzadeh at Shahid Beheshti University. She is now studying the genetics of mitochondrial DNA gene expression.
Sol Taylor-Brill
Graduate student
Sol is a PhD student in the Molecular, Cellular, Developmental Biology & Genetics (MCDBG) program, and an MS student in the BICB program at the University of Minnesota. She received her bachelors in Biology from Reed College in 2020. She is currently studying mitochondrial DNA variation in South Asian populations.
Bryan Le
Graduate student
Bryan is an MS student in the BICB program at the University of Minnesota. He completed his bachelor’s degree in Biology at Carleton College, where he also worked in a computational lab researching early microbial evolution on Earth. Currently, Bryan is studying the role of mitochondrial DNA copy-number in driving gene expression and disease development.
Esha Bandyopadhyay
Postdoc
Esha is a postdoctoral fellow in the Zaidi lab at the Department of Genetics, Cell Biology, and Development at the University of Minnesota. She completed her B.Tech (2015) and M.Tech (2017) in Genetic Engineering from SRM University, India. As part of her M.Tech thesis, she spent six months at the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. In 2024, she earned her Ph.D. in Human Genetics under the supervision of Maanasa Raghavan from the University of Chicago. Her doctoral research focused on reconstructing the human genetic history of the Indian Himalayas and Northeast India using ancient genomics.
Baasit Mahmood
Undergraduate student
Baasit is a first-year undergraduate student in the College of Biological Sciences (CBS) at the University of Minnesota, majoring in Genetics, Cell Biology, and Development. During his time in CBS, he has investigated altruistic behavior in bacterial populations. He is currently trying to clarify the meaning of “genetic architecture” in human genetics.
Alumni
Jinguo Huang
PhD student (2021 - 2024) - Now a research scientist at Calico